For a minute, she lets herself imagine the larger sinkhole below the baby one opening very slowly and cupping her and the house and the dog and the piano all the way to the very black bottom of the limestone hollow and gently depositing them there so far down that nobody could get her out, they could only visit, her family’s heads peering once in a while over the lip, tiny pale bits against the blue sky.
From down there, everyone would seem so happy.
She comes in from the rain.
The kitchen is too bright.
Surely, in the history of humanity, she is not the only one to feel like this.
Surely, in the history of herself, all of those versions atop previous versions, she has felt worse.
It was called the New World, but Puc-Puggy understood that there was nothing new about it, as almost every step we take over those fertile heights, discovers remains and traces of ancient human habitations and cultivation.
* * *
—
She takes off the wet boots, the wet jacket, the wet skirt, the wet shirt, and, shivering, picks up her phone to call her husband.
The dog is licking the rain off her knees with a warm and loving tongue.
If she says sinkhole, her husband will race home in the rain with her children and their goodies.
They will put the boys to bed and stand together at the lip of the sinkhole, and maybe she will become solid again.
And so, when he picks up, she will say, Babe, I think we have a problem, but she will say it in the warmest, softest voice she owns, having learned from a master the way to deliver bad news.
She lets her hunger for her husband’s voice grow until she is almost incandescent with it.
As the phone rings and rings, she says to the dog, who is looking up at her, Well, nobody can say that I’m not trying.
ABOVE AND BELOW
She’d been kept awake all night by the palm berries clattering on the roof, and when she woke to the sun blazing through the window, she’d had enough. Goodbye to all that! she sang, moving the little she owned to the station wagon: her ex-boyfriend’s guitar, the camping equipment they’d bought the first year of grad school (their single night on the Suwannee, they were petrified by the bellows of the bull gators), a crate of books. Goodbye to the hundreds of others she was leaving stacked against the wall. Worthless, the man had told her when she’d tried to sell them.
Goodbye to the mountain of debt she was slithering out from underneath. Goodbye to the hunter-orange eviction notice. Goodbye to longing. She would be empty now, having chosen to lose.
The apartment was a shell, scoured to enamel. She breathed fully when she stepped out onto the porch. There was a brief swim of vertigo only when she shooed the cat out the door. Oh, you’ll be all right, she said, and reached for the silky fur between his ears, but as quick as a blink, he struck at her. When she looked up from the four jagged lines slowly beading with blood on the back of her hand, he had leapt away. Then he, too, was gone.
* * *
—
She drove past the brick university, where the first-years were already unloading their sedans, their parents hugging their own shoulders for comfort. Goodbye, she said aloud to the tune of the tires humming on the road.
After a summer with the power shut off, a summer of reading by the open window in her sweat-soaked underwear, the car’s air conditioner felt frigid. She opened the window and smelled the queer dank musk of deep-country Florida. Out here, people decorated their yards with big rocks and believed they could talk to God. Here, “Derrida” was only French for rear end.
She thrust her fist out the window and released it slowly. She could almost see her hopes peeling from her palm and skipping down the road in her wake: the books with her name on them; the sabbatical in Florence; the gleaming modern house at the edge of the woods. Gone.
When she looked at her hand again, it was puffy and hot and oozing. She put it to her mouth. When she stopped at last at the edge of a little oceanside town and gazed over the dune grass at the sea, her tongue was coppery with the taste of blood.
* * *
—
Someone had left a cooler on the beach, and it still held a bag of apples, a half-eaten sandwich, two Cokes. She sat, watching the dusk turn mustard and watermelon, and ate everything. Seabirds clustered on the wet sand, then winged apart into the air. When it grew too dark for her to see, she took the cooler back to the car and walked up to A1A to a pay phone.
She was poised to hang up if her stepfather answered, but it was her mother, vague and slow, saying Hello? Hello?
She couldn’t speak. She imagined her mother in her nightgown in the kitchen, a sunset, the neighbor kids playing outside.
Hello? her mother said again, and she managed, Hello, Mom.
Honey, her mother said. What a treat to hear from you.
Mom, she said. I just wanted to let you know that I moved. I don’t have a new number yet, though.
She waited, feeling the sunburn begin to prickle in her cheeks, but her mother said only, Is that so? absently. Ever since she’d been remarried, she’d had chronic idiopathic pain, treated, also chronically, with painkillers. She hadn’t remembered her daughter’s birthday for three years; she’d sent empty care packages more than once. One hot July day, when the girl had stared at her sickening bank balance at the ATM, she’d considered calling for help. But she’d known, somehow, that the envelope would also arrive empty.
Over the line, there was the sound of an engine drawing close, and her mother said, Oh! Your dad’s home. They both listened to the slam of the door and the heavy boots on the steps, and she thought but didn’t say, That man is not my dad.
Instead she said, Mom, I just want you to not worry if you don’t hear from me for a while. Okay? I’m all right, I promise.
All right, honey, her mother said, her voice already softer, anticipating her husband’s arrival. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.
As the girl walked back on the road, headlights spinning by in the dark, she said aloud, I’m doing exactly what you would do, and laughed, but it wasn’t very funny after all.
* * *
—
During the day, she lay in the sun for hours until she was so thirsty she had to fill her camping water bottle at the fish-washing hose again and again. In the rearview mirror, she watched her skin toast and her hair shift from honey to lemon. Her clothes flapped on her. She thought of the thousands of dollars she’d spent on highlights over the years: all that anguish, all those diets, when all she needed to be pretty was laziness and some mild starvation! She ate cans of tuna and sleeves of crackers and drank an occasional coffee from the beach café for pep. Her money dwindled alarmingly. The scar on her hand turned a lovely silver in the sun, and she sometimes stroked it absently, signifier in lieu of signified, the scratch for the lost life.
At night, she lay in the back of the station wagon and read Middlemarch with a penlight until she fell asleep.