"Notes on the Revelations of an Unknown Dissident"
[a third watch story]
By Darkwaters.
- - -
"To whom, my lord? with whom? how am I false?"
'desdemona; act IV, scene ii, line 41'
--othello, shakespeare
"We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows."
'the secret sits'
--robert frost
"Silence (si[CA1] -lens) n. stillness; quietness; calm; refraining from speech; muteness; dumbness; secrecy; oblivion; --interj. be quiet!: --v.t. to cause to be still; to forbid to speak; to hush; to calm; to refute; to gag; to kill. --si'lent a. free from sound or noise; indisposed to talk; unpronounced, as a vowel or consonant. [L. silentium]."
'definition of silence'
--webster's home and office dictionary
- - -
She has heard silence described as a bottomless pit, or as a drowning, or as a subtle death. She's heard about silences—lifeless, still things that sucked you into them like black holes; that pulled you down in the undercurrent of whitewater riptides. This, she knows, is a lie. Silences are not like still pools, she thinks; they're like cling-wrap. They're like sticky spun sugar, or better yet, taffy; they are soft and oh-so saccharin (they stick and cling and work their way under the skin and lie, lie, lie). But the silence, she thinks, is better than talking. If they talk, things might get said that are better left unsaid.
Can I talk to you?
This is what she knows as she moves around the kitchen in the pearlized gray morning light. She pulls down three ceramic bowls with blue strips and places them on the table with several cereal boxes and a jug of milk. The milk is half empty she notes, and files it away for later in the back of her mind (butter, tampons, cheese, bread, and now milk; she tallies it up in her head and frowns, shrugs, and makes sure to remember them for later, after shift). She places spoons by the bowls and glasses by the spoons. A pitcher of berry punch sits by the milk. One of the bowls has a crescent-shaped chip on its rim, marring the smooth circle of the lip. The cartoon faces on the cereal boxes grin maniacally at her and she calls the children for breakfast, staring absently at the box, wondering why it bothers her.
Charlie comes first, blinking and yawning, not yet quite awake. He still has his PJ's on—the red ones with the gangly cowboy puppet from Toy Story on them—and he hasn't brushed his hair yet. He pours his cereal, something sugary and brown, and dribbles some milk on it; Charlie doesn't like milk and tries to get away with drinking the absolute minimum he can of it. She doesn't make him pour more milk into his cereal this morning, which he takes heart from and, daringly, adds more brown-colored sugar balls to his bowl. His eye dart to her face, but she says nothing. She thinks; he might as well just eat them from the box, but there is no sourness in her thoughts. She is calm, and lying, lying, lying. To whom, she isn't sure.
I—I need to talk to you.
She, herself, doesn't have cereal. She opens the refrigerator and pulls out a cup of yogurt randomly. It's vanilla, and as she pulls the foil off it sounds like ripping skin: moist and sharp. She rummages in a drawer for a spoon with one hand while she lays the sticky foil on the counter carefully with the other. The crinkled silver is covered in a sheen of milky yogurt. It reminds her, oddly, of mucus. She can feel Charlie looking at her—scrutinizing her—but she ignores him, and stares out the window over the sink. It's barely light out; the sky is a smudged oil pastel sketch—all soft edges and blurred lines, runny and melting like an ice-cream cone on a hot day. Its layered, wavy line upon wavy line, piled haphazardly from the angry pink of the horizon up. She thinks of sediment, and the walls of the Grand Canon.
The color flows, jaggedly, from bottom to top. First thin, thread-like pink ripping raggedly along the rim of the sky: binding the seam of the world. Then that swirling pearly-pink gray that you see in the cusp of oyster shells; then gray, true deep gray, like the sharp wings of a dove; then slate gray; slate blue; then blue gray, and smoky yellow; gray white; peach; a strange gray-aqua, almost green; violet slate (almost silver); charcoal; pale blue-white, like milk; smoke gray (so pale and insubstantial, it's almost not there); smoke blue; and then, finally, peacock—rich and thrumming with color, and arcing over the blackened city spires like a far-flung cloak. Her face is reflected back to her in the windowpane. Wide-jawed, high-cheeked, long-mouthed, large-eyed, all transparent, all rimmed in palest pinkie-blue (redder, though, at her cheeks). The kitchen lights back-lighting her outline her face, and she sees her countenance as both open and empty, and full and closed at the same time. This disturbs her and she wonders about the paradox of the idea. She wonders if she's seeing only what she wants to see. She wishes she could ask Fred (as she always has before, but—somehow—can't now), and the fleeting thought of asking Bosco rambles through her mind, and stumbles over her thought of asking Fred. And suddenly it's all she can do just not to burst into tears.
She turns away, blind, from the wide-eyed image in the streaky window pane and inward to the kitchen cupboards, fingers searching mole-like for glasses before remembering that she has already put them out.
Please, Faith, oh God please talk to me.
She hears Emily in the bathroom, and looks faintly concerned towards the clock. Emily, of late, takes too much time in the bathroom before she goes to school. There have been times when Emily has made all of them (or sometimes only some of them) late. She has also been perturbed about her daughter's mode of dress recently; it was too adult, too un-Emily. The mother in her rebels against popular sex-kittenish look her daughter has adopted, just as the prepubescent in Emily feels the need to rebel against the values her mother tries to imprint on her. She ascribes it to a teenage-hormonal thing and prays that she's right, not sure she can handle this Emily for the rest of her life. She puts a spoonful of the sweetly bitter tasting yogurt in her mouth and sucks on the spoon, moving her tongue around the small, smooth, scoop of metal, pulling it against her teeth and savoring the coppery metallic taste it leaves behind, like blood.
Emily walks into the kitchen, sullen and defiant and proud in turns. The young girl is wearing a skinny magenta shirt that clings unattractively to her young body, straining over the small, hard knots of her maturing breasts. Emily is still at that awkward stage, between child, girl, and woman, where she can afford to not wear a bra, but it is still apparent that she is no longer an 'it.' Low-riding jeans complete the outfit, revealing a line of (far too much, she thinks in dismay) milky-pink flesh between shirt-bottom and jeans-waist. The clothes, by themselves, might have been mild enough that she would have let it pass if only for the reason that she dearly didn't want to speak. But Emily had clearly been feeling a greater need than usual to defy her mother. She'd smeared her lips with bright cherry-red, and outlined her eyes with black, black kohl. It made those oh-so familiar heavy-lidded eyes into something bordering on obscene in someone so young. Had Emily been older, she would have called those dark-rimmed eyes, bedroom eyes. Emily looks at her mother with something so flat in eyes that are shaped so much like her own, and colored in Fred's honest brown, that it's disconcerting, and she has to look away. Emily tilts her chin up, and gives a glare of half triumph, half fear, and all rage. Emily, she knows, is old enough to understand what has happened, despite the fact that she herself wasn't entirely sure what it has happened. And Emily knows that her mother doesn't know.
I just thought we'd—I dunno. I should go.
This, unlike Charlie's gentle rebellion of sugar, cereal, and milk, is something that she cannot ignore. She sucks once more on her spoon, then places it back in her yogurt, and makes a fluttering movement with her hands. She detests unnecessary gestures in others when speaking, and loathes that she is reduced to them. It takes her a moment to find her voice and then her words.
"Take that junk off," (one of her hands flits softly to her own face, light touching her own lips and eyes which are tingling in sympathy to her daughter's, pantomiming what she is talking about) "All of it. You're not going to school like that." Emily's face pales and tightens with rage, contort with fury—the girl's eyes flashing brightly with something else as well, but she hesitates to name it—and Emily leaps up from the table and stalks into the bathroom. Fred emerges just as Emily slams the bathroom door. Charlie is staring at her silently, thoughtfully, catches her looking at him and looks away.
Fred shakes his head, like a dog coming out of water or, better yet, like a bear. She thinks this is an accurate analogy; Fred is like a bear. He gives off the feeling of height and compact power without actually being tall, or powerful. He is thick—thick muscles: thick flesh: thick features. She looks at his shoulders, his short, powerful neck and the square set of his jaw, and thinks; like a bear, just like a bear. Her partner is wiry and lithe. Bosco has a swimmer's build, with a long, lightly muscles neck and broad, sloping shoulders. For some very odd reason, Bosco has always reminded her of an otter, long and sleek and brown. She remembers that, when she was young, a child, she had been afraid of bears. She remembers with abrupt clarity that she has always like otters, though. They had been her favorite exhibits at the Zoo. Fred looks at her and thinks, with a sudden irrationality, that she hopes he doesn't know what she's thinking. She looks at him slightly off-center, slightly over his shoulder, slightly above his head. Not at him.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I just needed—He stares at her, then, like she is something strange and new and, irritated, she wants to tell him to stop, to—take a picture; it will last longer. Instead she turns to the sink, reaching for the sponge before dropping her hand back to the counter, then reaching out again (for a water jug this time), and waters the African violets on the window ledge. There is something that feels suspiciously like a lump in her throat, and she is careful to keep her eyes on her hands. She hears the bathroom door open, and then Charlie gets up from his seat. He puts his bowl in the sink by her wrists and pads from the room to dress. She can hear Emily behind her clearly; her movements are stiff with fury. Fred does not move at all, and she feels heat creep up her neck, and is angry that it should, and wonders why.
"I'll drop the kids off Faith," Fred says flatly. His voice is a thick, gelatinous substance; transparent should anyone care to look through it. But when Fred feels any really strong emotion, his voice drops, goes level, and does not react. It become opaque; like stone; like shale. He controls it with an iron fist and in return it becomes careful, like he's thinking about every word before he says it. Like every word is costly. Faith raises her eyes to his, stricken, ashen: shaky in her skin. Why forms like a wail, like a lamentation, in the back of her throat and dies still born on her lips. Her hands flutter by her sides, because for the first time in her life she is uncertain what to do with them, and she almost reaches for him—to shake him, to hit him, to hold him; she isn't sure. Emily leaves the room to get her coat, shoes, and bag. She leaves her dishes on the table; cereal half eaten, juice half drunk. She stares at Fred and he stares back.
I—Can I talk to you?
"Thanks," Faith says. "I'll pick up the groceries before I come home."
- - -
Faith stands in the frozen goods isle, between the butter and the milk, in front of the yogurt section. One hand taps the handlebar of the grocery wagon; short, rounded nails making a clipped tattoo. Tat, rata, tataratat, rata, tat. She is meditating between yogurt brands and types, thinking that Charlie won't eat yogurt, Emily doesn't really care, and Fred only eats stirred. She likes the kind that comes with the fruit syrup on the bottom of the cup, thick and bittersweet and waiting to be stirred, but nobody else will eat it. She chews on her thumbnail, and stops. She reaches out to the stirred yogurt, and stops again.
They were falling, and falling; they wouldn't stop falling.
She says softly; "fuck it," and she reaches for the non-stirred yogurt—strawberry; raspberry; blackberry; blueberry. She picks out twenty: five of each. She hesitates, then throws some vanilla and banana in the wagon as well. She stiffens her spine and feels heat creep up her throat and suffuse her cheeks. She feels as if everybody is staring at her, but knows that no one is, and she makes her way round the store for the rest of her items (coffee grounds, tampons, butter, cheese, bread, milk), and then heads to the check-out line.
It's late—about nine—and the line is short. There is nobody behind her. She looks at the magazines in the racks as she waits for her turn. She looks at the glossy covers with their air-brushed models on them and thinks foolishly, belatedly, of her Emily, and Faith wishes she could blind her to these magazines and protect her from their articles on perfect bodies; perfect outfits; perfect boyfriends and sex. Unconsciously, Faith touches her own hair, twists a short strawberry-ash strand around her index finger, then tugs, and wonders if she looked more like one of those models that then her daughter would listen to her. Faith hopes not; hopes her daughter has a better character than that, and she moves up in the line. She catches the title of one magazine article that declares in fuchsia; "How to Know If Your Spouse is CHEATING On You," and she quickly looks away, flushing. Faith is angry; she has done nothing, why the shame? She has done nothing. Then, red with shame and anger in liberal parts, she deliberately turns back to the magazine and snatches it up, tosses it in the cart quickly; acts as if it burns her hands.
Yeah I was mad; I was gonna talk to you, just not then. You didn't give me a chance.
The cashier smiles blankly at her; mouth grinning, gaping, red and ragged like a torn bit of tissue paper. It's a slash of fire engine red across the blotchy, scabby, pockmarked landscape of face. She is in her early twenties (Faith thinks, but is not sure) though there is something about her that might make one think she is closer to forty. The cashier's eyes are deep-set smudges of gray and black, neither young nor old nor anywhere in-between. Her brittle, child-like fingers are laden with chunky silver rings, most likely Mexican. Her teeth are stained faintly yellow from tobacco and booze, and she rings in Faith's purchases with familiar brisk efficiency, never pausing (not over the thirty cans of yogurt nor the magazine) while Faith feels her breath stick stubbornly in her throat, rages that it should, thinks that she should put the magazine back, but can't because the cashier is looking at her, smile fixed, hand poised over the gently humming register as she waits for the bill to process.
"Paper or plastic?" She asks, heavy fingered hands resting lightly in front of her. Faith stares at her, befuddled; feels like she has just come up from being underwater, she breathes—gasps for language.
You didn't give me a chance.
"Paper?" The girl repeats, drumming her fingers once, restlessly. "Or plastic?" Faith sees this and, startled, images of so many other girls like this cascade through her mind, crash through her thoughts, whirling, spinning; turning over like the fragments of scenes from a kaleidoscope and then stops and refocuses on Emily. Emily: with her black-ringed eyes and red-slashed mouth, like a damaged hibiscus, crimson and garish.
I'm sorry, Jesus Faith, I'm sorry; they just kept falling.
"Paper or—" The cashier begins again, calling out the phrase singsong; repeating it like a parrot.
"Plastic," Faith interrupts quickly. The cashier nods, smile fixed; eyes empty—listless, and starts to bag the groceries, and, oddly, Faith feels that she has just said the wrong thing.
- - -
Faith lies in bed, on her side, in the dark. Fred is asleep beside her, lying still, on his back. He releases soft, gravely gasps, almost snores, and does not move. He sleeps with a guardedness that he did not have even two nights ago. The magazine and its titillating, shameful articles lies like a hidden sin in her underwear drawer. She hasn't looked in it since she bought it. When she got home and unpacked the groceries, she felt supremely stupid for having purchased the superficial thing. She had quickly put it out of sight, and tried to forget about it.
Can I talk to you?She can't sleep; doesn't want to sleep. It's an accumulation of things, she knows. She sits up. Faith looks back at Fred. He, as if sensing her gaze on him, turns over, and Faith looks away; looks straight ahead at the dark blur of the wall and feels some odd uneasiness in her throat. It coils like a necklace of gilded lead around her neck, resting solidly on her collarbone. She pulls a loose knitted wrap from the bedside chair, shrugs it over her shoulders, and quietly leaves the room.
Emily had been in her room by the time she'd returned home; Charlie had already been put to bed as well. Faith had stood over her son and stared down at him, down at his face and the pale, strawberry-gold hair that stuck to his sleep-flushed forehead in clumps of blushing platinum. She'd had the urge to lie down next to him, and curl up around his diminutive body like a huge blanket, but there was a residual feeling of filth that clung to her—a nagging feeling of unworthiness—so she'd just touched his hair. She'd brushed his sleep-flushed cheek with the tips of her fingers; the calluses of her hands (deep, tough, grooves worn into her skin by work and time) catching on the fine, invisible, baby-hairs that littered the rouge apple of his cheek, and backed out his bedroom door.
She remembers wanting to do the same to Emily; remembers wanting to allay some of the thoughts that have been buzzing around in her head as she'd stood silently outside her daughter's door. She'd wanted to stand over Emily and see the child that she knows her daughter to still be, no matter how hard she fought it or how much she knew. She instead now stands leaning against the doorframe of Emily's door, remembering the earlier thrum of the angry music pulsing through the door, through her bones. Faith feels tired suddenly; tired of Emily; tired of Charlie (she feels a faint twinge of guilt); tired of Fred; tired of Bosco—tired of herself.
Good God Faith, I didn't know what to do. I was scared.
She pushes herself up from Emily's doorframe and goes into the living room. The living room is small, and it opens into the kitchen, which is also small. For moment she mourns for the kitchen and living room she lost; she mourned the same thing the moment she got up from the Sergeant's test knowing that she had lost it with the failing of the test. But it was a passing grief and she had moved on; forced herself to move on. The Sergeant's position would have given her family so much, she thinks, but she lets it go because there is nothing else that she can do. She knows, on some level, that she blames Bosco for it—not for failing the test so much as for causing the wish in herself that she would not pass it. And that is Bosco's fault, regrettably, she thinks staring around the living room. That is Bosco's fault.
I need—I need to talk to you.
She casts her mind back a night to Bosco weeping brokenly on her couch; his face crumpled and blanched with terror as well as tears, encircled firmly within the circumference of her arms while he shakes and burrows into her sweater-clad shoulder. It surprises her that he chose to break down in front of her; not that she minds, oh no, Faith hastily adds mentally. Bosco is her partner. He is supposed to come to her with his troubles; he is supposed to talk to her. It promotes a healthy partnership (or so says the Chief), but things have been bad between them for so long that it'd surprised her when she opened her door and found him standing wide-eyed in her doorway alcove. They'd talked. They'd had to. What else could they, could she, do? He'd cried, bawled really; wept like a terrified newborn, and with (only a little hesitation) she'd held him to her. And then, afterwards, after all the terror, all the tears, all the fury and hurt and guilt had been aired (and she'd thought, Faith remembers suddenly, of the line from Macbeth's final soliloquy; full of sound and fury and signifying nothing), she'd made coffee.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
But it wasn't 'nothing', and that was what had been bothering her, Faith thinks clearly in the darkling hours. It had not been nothing. But it should have been, oh it should have been. She still remembers the look she'd seen on Fred's face over the fragile curve of Bosco's shuddering back. More though, she remembers the feel of Bosco's hair against the skin of her chin and cheek—soft, thick and just slightly springy; like it wanted to twist into fat velvet curls. It had reminded her of an animal's pelt. He had smelt of salt and defeat. Fred had looked so—what, she asks herself wonderingly, sliding her cooling hands around her neck, tugging at the wisps of pale hair at the base of her skull.
Fred had looked so what? She asks herself. So what? It was a paradox; it was a rhetorical question, and, suddenly, she finds that she doesn't care. Sitting shivering in the big, lumpy armchair, Faith finds that she doesn't care what Fred felt, what Fred still feels, what Fred thought, what Fred still thinks; and that in itself angers her because she thinks that she should care. It troubles her because she knows she should. She doesn't, but she thinks she should. She knows she should. Fred exhausts her. He's like a small child (she thinks in the privacy of her mind), always taking and taking and taking—though there are times when, like a very young child, he will give up something and then act as if he has just made the greatest sacrifice of all. That is why she should care; he needs her. Not in the way that Bosco needs her, she thinks in tired, muddled relief, but he needs her nonetheless, and she resents him for it.
So what? So what? So what? So what?
This makes her think of Bosco again. Bosco, too, needs her; she sees evidence of it every now and again. He, unlike Fred, tries to hide his craving for comfort. She has to watch him spiral in freefall through his life, clutching at whatever precipice he can through sex and violence and control, but she sees each one crumble under his fingers before he starts falling again, and wonders when he won't be able to stop himself from falling any more, and if then, finally, he will come to her. She feels a strange sort of surety that, in the end, when he has nothing left, he will come to her. It's not something she can explain, nor is it something that she wants to examine too closely, for fear that what she finds will be too big, too, too complicated, too much for her to deal with, and then she'll have to confront it, whatever the cost. And in the deepest recesses of her heart she knows that the cost will be great—perhaps too great. She sighs, presses her hands over her cheeks, feels the fine hairs like warm peach-fuzz against the hardened skin of her palms, slides them up over her eyes, and hides from herself. She laughs into her skin, and it is not a happy sound.
I need—I dunno. Faith, I—
She lets herself fall limp on the chair; drapes herself like a piece of wet lace across the age-muted brocade of the armchair, and pretends that she will slip through the cracks of the material like a particle of dust. She is waiting, blind, for something to happen; for something to change, to explode; to implode—she is waiting for the sky to fall about her ears and she doesn't know what to do about it.
And she isn't at all sure that she really wants to do anything about it either.
She huddles into her chest. She laughs again, and, again, it is not a happy sound. She cradles her forehead in her hands, lacing her fingers in a lattice of flesh and blood and bone across her brow. She sighs. She stands, and, without pausing, she moves fluidly, purposefully, into the kitchen.
The linoleum is chilly against the coarse skin of her feet. It feels as smooth and fresh as water on the rough, thickened flesh of her soles. Faith stops in the middle of the kitchen floor, suddenly unsure what it is she is doing, and she bites her lip, wraps her arms around her middle and stares around the room. It's foreign to her suddenly, alien. She sees the violets on the window ledge, and the dish-wrack by the sink, and the tattered gray tea-towels hanging from the stove handle, and the wineglasses glinting sharply from the back of the shelf, right behind the mugs and plastic cups; and she has that sudden, horrible sense of unfamiliarity that strikes like lightening, like déjà vu, at odd moments in the lost vistas of the day. It feels like she has been displaced; transported suddenly and against her will to another universe, and she realizes that it's been that way since she held her partner while he wept. Faith's hands fly to her face, resting against the blood-flushed flesh of her cheeks in slender sheaths of cool bone and skin, and she feels her throat swell. A jolt crawls down her spine, sinking claws in every second vertebra, and she feels like she's drowning.
She remembers the hard, taunt feel of Bosco's body against hers.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry; Faith I—Between her lips comes her breath—a hiss. She has the urge to start to tiptoe and be furtive, like a thief, and this gives her the impulse to laugh wildly, hysterically. She can see it now. Why yes Chief: I was the one sneaking about my house this morning. No, no, I wasn't trying to break in—I was having a moment of extreme déjà vu. She imagines Fred speaking against her, committing her, thick face contorted in florid disbelief and fury and chagrin at having his wife, an officer herself, arrested. What she pretends she doesn't see, even in her imagination, is the relief, the triumph in her husband's face, and the resounding knowledge that he was right.
Can I talk to you?
It troubles her that she is so bent on proving him, not so much wrong, as not right. Faith tries not to dwell on this and pulls a cup down from the shelf above the sink and goes to the fridge. One of Charlie's drawings is on it: a crayon scribble of his family. She looks at it and sees Emily standing close to Fred, with herself slightly apart from them. Charlie, himself, is in the middle, smiling his huge, black, waxy crayon grin, and, Faith sees with a jolt, Bosco is standing just a little behind her, but close to her; an unskilled mirror of Emily and Fred's pose. She swallows, trembles, opens the fridge door, pulls out some milk and then turns away from the fridge and the picture. Faith pours the milk into the cup. Charlie, she knows, knows nothing but that Daddy is upset; apparently with Mommy, and that they aren't getting a big new house. He doesn't know anything.
I need—Faith, please.
But there is nothing for him to know, she thinks wildly, heart beating frantically at its cage of blood and bone and fine violet veins. There is nothing to know. She is angry she should be so concerned that Charlie might know something when there is nothing to know. She is upset that she even thought of it in the first place. She is upset because now a part of her must think: is there something? And she doesn't want to answer that question.
Faith takes a sip of her milk, grimaces and, hesitantly, leaves it on the counter. She can't rid herself of the feeling of displacement. And, strangely, some part of her doesn't want to.
Make it stop.
She goes back into the living room, pauses on the threshold, and then heads towards her room. Inside Fred is still asleep. He does not move as she stands at the foot of the bed, and she is unexpectedly furious with him—blindly, madly, thoughtlessly furious. She wants to rip the covers off him and scream in his face, 'look at me look at me look at me!' And this doesn't make any sense to her because she doesn't know what she wants him to look at. The vicious, wistful thought, Bosco would, slips through her teeming brain and, shamed, she turns away. She dismisses the thought with scornful disdain (and tries to ignore the confidence she'd felt in the thought)—would what? Would know what she meant? She doesn't even know what she meant. Would know what she wants him to see? Is there really anything for him to see, anyway? Her eyes itch, and she rubs then, ignoring the sticky dampness that they leave like snail tracks on the back of her hand.
I want to talk to you Faith.
Faith abruptly goes over to her dresser and rummages softly through the top drawer. She touches the slick cover of the magazine she'd bought, and, with only a brief pause, she pulls it out. She stares at the gaudy cover, gleaming gently in the dusky light. Her eyes skip over all the other headings and stick on the word cheating. It scares her and repulses her and she can't look away. She rolls it in a tube and grips it with both hands; she looks around the room, skips her eyes over Fred, and heads to the bathroom.
They have two bathrooms in the apartment; one is in the hallway between the living room, kitchen and sleeping quarters. The other is attached to the master bedroom. It is about the size of a large closet. It holds a shower, a toilet and a sink; the bathtub is in the larger family bathroom. The compensation for the smaller size of the master bath is that it has a lock on the door. Faith, who has never really given it any thought before, is now suddenly grateful for the privacy this feature offers. She locks the door after her as she enters. Then she turns the cover on the toilet seat down on the milk-colored plastic lid. There is a fine sort of trembling that rushes through her veins now; it's like ice water has been poured into her heart and now flushes her extremities with chill and hoary frost. Gooseflesh is rising on her legs and forearms. She ignores the cold (both internal and ex) and focuses her complete attention on the soft magazine in her hands.
It's incongruous looking against the camp mid '70s floor tiles and the milk-blue color of her flesh; garish and out of place like a clown at a funeral. There is a spidery-legged model on the cover in a chic designer dress. Parts of her are obscured by neon font (in bold) that proclaim the various headlining articles to the world: 25 SEX MOVES to improve your sex life, how to get the BODY you really need, FALL FASHIONS for the NEW MILLENNIUM, and (this is the one that she is really interested in) how to know if your spouse is CHEATING on you. Faith licks her lips, and tries not to think about why she is doing this.
How to know if your spouse is cheating on you, page thirty-five. She turns to page thirty-five. It opens with a brief definition.
Cheating, i.e., a cheat (chet): v.t. To deceive; to defraud; to trick—v.i. to practice trickery; —n. a fraud; an imposture; one who cheats; an impostor. —Cheat'er n. [short for escheat]
One who cheats.
Faith I . . . Really need—you, right now.
Fred looking at her over the fragile curve of Bosco's spine.
An impostor.
The article is a list of things like, "has s/he been coming home late more often," and, "does s/he take more business trips than usual lately?" Faith closes her eyes and bites down on her tongue to keep from screaming. This is not what she wants. This is not what she needs. She is relieved, in a way, but this is not want she wants. She isn't entirely certain what she wants, what she needs, but this is not it. She wants to cry. She laughs instead, and it hurts her throat and ears. She feels opaque and intangible. She likes the sound of that word, and rolls it in her head. Intangible. Faith thinks, that isn't right, and she looks down at her hands.
I sat on the curb and watched them fall.
She doesn't feel intangible; what she feels is intangible. Faith's not entirely clear exactly what the difference between the two is, but she knows there is one. Faith stares down blindly at the magazine clutched tightly between her hands.
Adultery and infidelity were not things widely discussed in her household growing up. In fact, they wasn't discussed at all except in passing mention of someone they knew (Did you hear? Jane left Andrew. For a salesman.), or thought they did. Then, in high school, there had been Fred, and no one else had ever once crossed her mind in that way. And after high school, they'd married, and that was that. She'd thought that she was unbearably happy, but now Faith is forced to consider the fact that maybe she doesn't know what happiness is.
It was terrifying.
She can remember, distantly, a time before Fred when her world had consisted of so much more than it did now. Faith thinks that she had been happy then, too, but there is far too much that she'd uncertain about now for her to be sure. She remembers once, when she was young—decades ago, Faith realizes with surprise—not being complicated. There had been her Mama (an image compiled of soap-scented lawn skirts, soft, quarrelsome voice, and cracked red skin), her Poppy (a short, supine figure with hair the color of a bloody sunrise, a swift tongue and an ever swifter hand) and that had been her entire world. Faith longs to become that simple again. She longs to make her world revolve around the uncomplicated idea of Fred and Emily and Charlie, and maybe even Bosco, to some extent. But Bosco is complicated, so he cannot be part of a simple world. And Faith is a rational adult. Faith knows that she cannot become simple because she is complicated. Like the silence is now.
The bathroom is cold. Drafts have found their way through the gaps in the aging wool of her sweater. There is a tension in the air around her that Faith hadn't been aware of before. She wraps her arms around her middle and rocks slowly, while she stares, sightlessly, at the white plaster of the wall in front of her. She thinks, if only I could speak, but the quiet has taken up residence in her throat and the words will not come.
"Faith?" Fred's voice is thick with the calluses of sleep on the other side of the door. She can picture him standing there with his hand splayed against the door, looking rumpled and tired in baggy sweats. Faith stills. She opens her mouth to say, go back to bed; I'm fine, I'm happy.
You didn't give me a chance.
But she isn't.
- - -
Faith stands by her locker. She is putting on her shirt. For a moment she isn't sure which shirt it is; her navy work shirt, or her cotton shirt from home. This scares her because never before has she been unable to separate her job-life and her home-life. She has always made sure that there was some sort of distinction there so she would bring the problems from one into the other. But, somehow, she can't hold the two apart anymore.
Her fingers fumble with her bag and she realizes that her sift is over; she is getting ready to go home. Her watch says that it's past midnight. Her husband and her children will be asleep in bed when she gets home.
Faith finds that she doesn't really want to go home.
Bosco comes in behind her, from the showers. His hair is wet, and it sticks to his forehead in dark clumps. His head is sleek, like the skull of an otter. He's humming softly to himself. Faith watches him from the corner of her eye. Faith thinks she should go home; that she should go right now.
But she doesn't.
Bosco is stuffing his arms into his jacket. It's an old black leather one that looks like it should belong to a biker. She doesn't know where he got it; he's had it forever. Faith quickly looks away as he starts to lock up his stuff. She realizes that she has been ready to leave for some time.
"Faith?" Bosco asks from behind her. She is staring blindly at the metal walls of her locker, hand poised on the frame. "You wanna grab a coffee with me or something to wind down?" She thinks again; I should go home.
Bosco's face is expectant; a sharp face with keen dark eyes and a square jaw. His hair is drying to a lighter shade of airy mahogany spikes. She tries not to think about his face weeping into the crook of her shoulder. She thinks she is going to refuse. She thinks she is going to go home, back to that vortex of resentful silence, and suddenly she terrified. Terrified and so very tired. Bosco acts like nothing has happen. He doesn't ignore it, but he treats it like it happens all the time. He treats it like it's something normal. Maybe it is. She doesn't know any more.
"I—I should get home, you know?" She says. Her voice sounds hoarse to her ears, like she hasn't spoken in years. Maybe she hasn't, she thinks. Maybe the silence has been there longer than she'd thought. "Fred an the kids will be in bed. I should go home."
"But if they're all already in bed, what's an hour over coffee?" Bosco counters with a puzzled grin. She can see that he's confused, but she isn't sure what she could say to explain it to him. She isn't sure she wants to.
"Faith?" He says when she doesn't answer. It's enough to irritate Faith, and a scowl curves her lips. She knows she should go home.
"Yeah," she says, not surprised of her answer, but despairing. "Sure."
But she doesn't.
- - -
Emily and Charlie are eating breakfast. Faith is cooking eggs and bacon at the stove. Fred is in the bathroom. He has not asked her where she was last night, nor why she came home so late.
She is taking the kids to school today, and she says to them, "Eat up; you don't want to be late." She can hear Fred moving around in the bedroom.
The light outside the kitchen window is watery and warm. The sky is several shades of pearl and rose, layer upon layer arcing over the city spires; Faith thinks that it looks like rain. She stirs the eggs and moves some of the bacon to a plate.
"Take a rain coat," she tells Emily and Charlie. "You may need it today."
Faith moves about the kitchen restlessly. She rinses some of the dishes in the sink and puts them in the wrack. She grabs some fruit from the fruit bowl and looks in the fridge for some lunch food. She can feel Emily's eyes boring into the back of her skull. She wants to say stop it.
Faith tries to concentrate on making sandwiches. She pulls ham, mayonnaise, mustard, pickles, lettuce, and cheese out of the fridge. She also gets out peanut butter because Charlie doesn't like cheese sandwiches. She spreads out the food on the counter, and then turns back to the stove.
She stirs they eggs again, then says in a mock drawl that thrills him, "Back your cart up Charlie. D'you want ketchup with 'em?" Charlie holds out his plate and Emily looks away. Emily, apparently, doesn't eat eggs anymore. But she does grab a piece of bacon. Faith turns off the burner and starts to make sandwiches: peanut butter and lettuce for Charlie, ham and cheese for Emily, and, hesitantly, a ham sandwich for Fred. She spreads the mayonnaise carefully, remembering that Fred doesn't like cheese.
Fred comes out of the bedroom and into the hall. She can hear him searching through the hall closet for his jean jacket.
"Your coat—the jean one? It's hanging on the chair in the living room," Faith calls out after a moment. "By the mirror." She hears Fred grunt, and he moves into the kitchen. She moves back to the stove for a moment to shovel the last few pieces of bacon onto a plate. Emily gets up from the table and leaves the room. Charlie is eating the last handful of egg on his plate, covered in copious amounts of ketchup. Fred opens the fridge and then closes the door. He looks, briefly, out the window. She takes a deep breath.
"So," she says carefully, studiously looking down at the frying pan. "Are we okay now?" She feels Fred still behind her. He half turns to her. She twists to look at him. Fred is standing in front of the window and she can see a transparent sickle of moon hanging just above the horizon, belly scraping the city top.
"I don't know." He says quietly. "Are we?" Charlie is slurping back his orange juice. His hand darts for the last piece of bacon on the plate. He looks pleadingly at the frying pan. Faith, distracted, stares after Fred as he moves out of the kitchen. She doesn't know what to say. She feels stupid and cruel and terrible.
And in that moment, Faith knows that she loves Fred, and that she hates Fred, and she isn't sure she can live without him, but she isn't sure she can live with him either. She isn't certain that she wants to be without him, and she isn't certain that she would know how to be without him. She puts down the frying pan and turns the burner off. The front door closes, and she feels her eyes are sore. Faith turns back to counter and the sandwiches. She finishes Emily's and Charlie's and puts Fred's back in the fridge.
"Go get dressed," she tells Charlie. He nods, slips down from his chair, and leaves the room. Faith rests her hands on the ledge of the sink and stares out the window. She thinks she could have said something, and wonders what it could have been. She pretends that she knows what she should have said.
"Are you driving us?" Emily asks from behind her. Faith can see her face in the streaky glass of the window. It's gray and tired. She can see Emily behind her, superposed over her own face, young, arrogant and knowing.
"Yeah," Faith says. "Your lunch is on the counter." Emily's lip curls and she can see her begin the acid of a reply about not needing a lunch.
"I'm getting dressed," she says. "We'll be out the door in ten."
- - -
Faith is in her room. She is getting dressed. She pulls on a long sleeved cotton shirt and jeans. She pulls her hair back in a low ponytail. She is ready to go. But she finds that she is also waiting. She is waiting for something to come and drive her out of the complacency that she feels mired in. She is waiting for someone to shake her and make her wake up. She is waiting for the moment when she will get up one night and get dressed, and leave as Fred watches her—as he has always been watching her—warily, waiting for the moment when she will close the door behind her.
- - -
Disclaimer: I own nothing except the hair on my head. Literally.
Author's note:
Not . . . bad, I guess. Well, not too bad. This, FYI, is immeaditly post "Falling" (the next morning to be precise), and directly—to the point of overlapping—pre "the Greater Good" (hopefully some of you will recognize the final scene). Now, I want to clear some things up. Firstly, the italicized lines you find sprinkled throughout the first few sections are, of course, Bosco's dialogue from "Falling" when he's talking with Faith in her living room . . . with a little judicious rewriting by yours truly (to tell the truth, I couldn't remember their exact conversation, and I couldn't find any transcripts online, so I just made it up as I went along). Secondly, I was formerly known as Ophelia, but have since changed my name to Darkwaters. And Thirdly, I want to stress that, while I am a F/B shipper, I like exploring some of the less . . . romantic angles of their relationship. Namely the fact that Faith is married, and that any feelings she could have for him would be considered unfaithful. But (and I hope that people noticed) I also tried to stress the fact that Faith was confused and anger (a bit of a twist from the norm, eh?) about those feelings. This is not finish; I repeat, not finish by any count. I have not had a chance to read over it, nor have I had a chance to show it to my Beta, so I may be periodically reposting with a more satisfactory version. But, because I am a feedback slut, I am posting for your viewing pleasure anyway.
Thank you for reading,
D.
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