The center was a smooth, long building with windows that reflected out at the street like a pair of sunglasses my mother ordered from some commercial when I was little, the kind where you could see in front and behind you at the same time. They were sneaky. I was feeling distrustful. I set my jaw against the world. I do not know why Thomas was always trying to make me go places I did not want to go. If I had never left bed in the morning with Thomas, it would have been just fine. Let us stay just how we are, I thought, frozen in love. I had never dreamed of bigger things like some people. There was a girl we went to high school with who ended up going all the way to Rhode Island for college. She was an artist, and she had a pointy tongue that she used to stick out at people when they teased her. She was quiet her whole life and then senior year she got accepted to art school and it was like everything changed at once for her. She started wearing bright red lipstick and dying her blond hair red and if anyone messed with her she would say, “I am counting the hours until I never have to deal with you again.” Sometimes she said it in a British accent. I thought she was funny.
But I was not her, thinking of something that existed beyond our flat horizon. I dreamed of the small things. Little noises, like the high-pitched squeal of the crickets calling for love, or the pregnant sizzle of bacon and eggs cooking together in a cast-iron frying pan. Or the different colors in our town, on our land, the purple and gold of prairie flowers, and the way those colors repeat themselves again and again, the plain, healthy green of the elm trees that shade the south side of the farmhouse, so it was the coolest part of our home. The swollen purple belly of our tiny town river after a storm, waves of anxious minnows following the flow of water. That was all, just the little details of the world around me. There was no plotline to my dreams, as much as I would have liked there to be sometimes, something to shoot for in the future. But I had no need for bigger things, no need for alteration to my self. That was how I felt then. Couldn’t I already be whole?
VALKA MADE a little coughing noise, only there was nothing stuck in her throat.
“What?” I said.
“I don’t mean to say Thomas was right about anything. And I am your friend and I will always take your side. But.”
She looked a little green, and she was biting her lower lip. She was straight up and honest almost all the time but sometimes telling a friend the truth was hard. I could see she was about to tell me I was wrong.
“Don’t stop now,” I said.
“If the sex isn’t there, it’s hard for a relationship to work. It’s possible for it to work. Kids, that’s one thing that keeps people together.” She said that part sadly, maybe wishing on a star for a second. “I don’t think your husband went about it the right way, although I don’t even know what the right way would necessarily be in that kind of situation. But if he felt incomplete, he had the right to try and fix it.”
“So what are you saying?” I said.
“I’m saying maybe you weren’t as whole as you think you were,” she said gently.
“MOONIE, please, don’t make me do this by myself,” said my husband.
“But I do not want you to do it,” I said. I spoke softly. I had been crying that morning, but I did not want him to know. But I could not muster up my full voice, the full version of me.
“A wife should support her husband in his decisions,” he said.
“A wife should be allowed to be a part of making those decisions,” I said.
“I want to be a whole man,” he said. “Help me be whole.” He spread his hands out in my lap, palms up, and he waited for me to put my palms flat on his, two parts making up a whole. I did it. I could not figure out how to stop it all from happening.
So I went with him, through the tall mirror doors. I kept waiting for them to work like fun house mirrors. There would be some whacked-out version of me looking back, my belly scrunched up like a bag of trash, or my arms long like a piece of taffy. But there I was, just me, in my short skirt, and puffy vest over my tank top, and my short little legs, and my long hair, so long and straight and blond, hanging all over me, down past my shoulders, almost to my waist. I was covered in hair. And there was my husband, his hand in mine, only a little bit taller than me, dark denim shirt bound up at the cuffs, pants hanging over his same scuffed work boots he had had forever, brown hair shooting up at the ends. There were those lines in his forehead from working outside in the sun for so long. I loved them. They could look worried or hypnotized or laughing depending on what channel he had clicked on at that moment. And there was the perfect peach of his cheeks, like something ripe and juicy that showed up at the end of summer at the farmer’s market over at the True Value parking lot. He never stopped talking or thinking or moving except when he was watching TV. And even then there was this energy that rippled through him, through those wrinkles in his forehead, like he was a snake charmer. He had enough energy for the both of us.
In the lobby we stopped and stood in front of a giant portrait of Rio DeCarlo, her arms waving high in the air, as if to say, “Welcome to my world!”