I had this new dress. It was completely over the top, but I wore it anyway. I guess I wanted to make a lasting impression. The slinky fabric, the hot pink and lime print, the bell sleeves, a dress no one’s mother had owned, surely. In the consignment shop on 19th Avenue, the saleslady slipped it off the mannequin and commented on my excellent taste.
“I’ll take that pale blue suitcase, too,” I said.
The blackberry bushes in the backyard engulf the swing set, now. They will ripen soon. More pies and jam I will fail to make. Last summer, the day I came home from the hospital the third time, I found Lynette at the stove, stirring sugar into berries and hot water. Miles bought frozen pie shells. The three of us ate pie.
Advice from my dead mother’s playbook: Tears are for clearing dust and tiny insects from your eyes.
Miraculously, I locate a clean pair of underwear and a bra in the bureau. For weeks, Miles has been coming home to the private moat of dirty laundry on my side of the bed. He pretends not to notice.
The dress falls cool past my shoulders, over my waist, belly, and thighs. The chainsaw noise in the living room signals the start of the Indy 500. Any minute, Miles will come into the bedroom to see if I’ll join him and our daughter, make it a family affair. When she was a colicky baby, the roar of Formula One cars soothed her.
Fifteen years ago, he made his way clear across campus, his gait uneven, and asked if he could borrow the notes for a lecture he’d missed.
“I don’t take notes,” I said.
“But I see you writing furiously, every class.”
“I’m doodling.”
He gestured over at the student union building, a shipwreck rising out of a concrete sea. “Good. I’ll buy the beer, and you can show me your doodles.”
Over beer, I asked, “Why do you limp?”
“Hit by a taxi.” He pointed to the bad hip. “A steel pin’s been holding me together since I was fourteen.”
“Good.”
“How is that good?” His eyes, a field of wild iris back home.
“You’re too handsome, otherwise,” I said.
He moved himself and his Siamese cat into my studio apartment. We cooked, made love. Managed to graduate. Got married. Managed to laugh at things that make most people cry.
“Don’t catch the house on fire,” Miles yells into the kitchen.
Lynette fires back, “A monkey can make Jiffy Pop!”
I hear the scrape of tin on the stove. She’s counting each pop.
Mom goes to the loony bin three times; daughter counts her world. Raisins in a handful. Tiles in the bath. Filaments of a web.
“Are you coming to watch the race?” Miles says through the bedroom door.
I close the suitcase. Toothbrush. Hairbrush. A pair of jeans, two pullovers, and three tees, a denim skirt I bought to drive out from Kentucky to California, ten minutes after I turned eighteen.
He joins me at the window and picks up one of the sand dollars lined up on the sill. Curving a calloused finger around the shell’s edge, he says, “That’s quite a dress. You going someplace special?”
His money has always been on the shrinks. Another fiction we maneuver, like the moat of laundry.
“You two are better off,” I say.
He sets down the sand dollar. “I’m going to call Dr. Ames.”
“I’m not going back there, Miles.”
“You don’t get to decide that.” He’s looking at the suitcase on the bed. “You know she’s rooting for Danny Sullivan?” He takes my chin and makes me look at him.
Sullivan is a Kentucky boy.
“Please don’t forget the lemons,” I say.
Miles grips my chin tighter. During a heatwave, when he was building the work shed, I picked lemons. Made the lemonade in an empty coffee can. No walls on the shed yet, just a frame and open air. Optimal conditions for making a baby, he said.
I pull away. My chin burns, and I hope it doesn’t stop. I need to feel.
“You’ll be back,” he says.
“Close the door behind you, please.”
I put on shoes, makeup. Our daughter watches from the mirror’s edge: Timid smile. Lips pressed shut over lost baby teeth. Pigtails, long tangled hair, short hair, long again, then smooth and shiny as a shampoo commercial actress. In these wallet-size girls, her father’s grey eyes and a conviction to live fully. Her 12th birthday party at the indoor rink is two weeks away. I will not stand next to Miles, who’s not a drunk and makes the best omelets in San Francisco, while she and her friends slice paths in the ice.
I slip the sand dollar Miles was holding into my purse and pick up my suitcase.
The broken ones get tossed back into the ocean. Lynette’s theory is that they find each other, mate, and form more perfect sand dollars.
“Like people?” I asked.
“No, Mom, they’re shells.”
Lee Doyle’s work has appeared in Calyx, Consequence, Nostos, The Healing Muse, Unbroken, and other publications. Her first novel, The Love We All Wait For, won Best Novel at the East of Eden Writers Conference. An audiobook of the novel, newly titled Hearts Crazier Than Mine, will be released this fall. Lee holds an MFA from the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University and shares a lair in San Rafael, California, with a black Lab named Jasper. She’s working on her second novel.
Lost Balloon 