My mother is doing a hot-oil treatment for her hands when I get home from work. She has another date with the man from the other night.
“He was a real gentleman,” she says, one hand in a hot pot of oil. She’s had some losers from the classifieds — young guys who wanted Mrs. Robinson types, a guy who split his pants on the dance floor — so this is a high compliment. With a wooden spoon she ladles the oil over every inch of her hand up to the wrist. As soon as she takes her hand out of the hot pot, the oil becomes a pink wax glove. She takes one of my hands and dips it. It’s burning hot at first, but then my hand starts to tingle as if it were electric.
“He speaks Italian,” she says and dips my other hand. “He ordered in Italian at dinner.” She says this shyly and cocks her head in a way that has evolved from a day years before I was born. Maybe she was walking down the street and did it accidentally — or on purpose, when a family like the one she didn’t have yet walked by or she was thinking about a lover. She caught her reflection in a store window, briefly, and saw herself years from then.
“A romantic,” I say, smiling, and I help her dip her other hand. We sit quietly at the kitchen table looking at our pink wax gloves, until there is a knock at the door.
My mother stands up and then holds up her hands, says, “How will I open it?”
It’s Raymond, who didn’t see my mother’s car parked on the street instead of in the driveway. “I’ll come back later,” he says through the window. “I didn’t mean to disturb you,” he says, looking only at my mother’s hands.
“The door’s unlocked,” my mother says. “Just push.” She’s laughing and having a good time, and I’m beginning to think I have a crush on her too.
Raymond finally pushes the door open. I convince Raymond, who is sure that my mother is laughing at him, to have a seat at the kitchen table.
“Wax dip?” I ask, but he shakes his head.
“The last thing I need is soft hands,” he says. We all smile instead of laughing out loud because it is suddenly so quiet with the three of us sitting around the hot pot on the kitchen table. Outside, the sky slowly darkens all around the neighborhood, all around town.
“I should go,” Raymond says. “I forgot what I came for.” My mother walks him to the door. She tells him to come by anytime, though he already has. Through the window I watch him cross the street, moving through time with all his clumsy yearning. Those moves are not so foreign. When my mother returns to the kitchen table, we slide the wax gloves off whole. Our hands are left greasy, and the wax husks sit empty on the table between us, each with its distinct imprint of vein, knuckles, age, and time. Years from now, when these days spent at home with my mother blend together and seem small, this night will distinguish itself from the rest.
DIRT
DELIA is dreaming that her husband, Austin, stands above her on the bed, contorting his features into a face that might at any moment stick out its tongue. He wiggles terrible fingers at her. This is not the first time, and tonight Delia wonders, in her dream, if it’s a dream at all. The thought scares her because he is the only person she knows in this new place full of dust and impossible sunshine.
When Delia wakes up, Austin is standing at the foot of the bed, already sweating in the soaring early morning temperatures. He is just out of the shower, but what is simply water and what is perspiration is as indistinguishable to Delia as her days in this house filled with a dead woman’s belongings. Delia spends her days drinking bottomless cups of tea as she carefully fingers objects: the giant ladle that hangs above the kitchen sink, the remaining sliver of English Lavender soap in the bathroom, the pictures of dead relatives, Austin’s aunt now among them.
The house is a gift to Austin, willed to him fully furnished by his favorite dead aunt. Delia feels the imprint of the old woman’s bones in the bed that she and Austin share. The bed is the wedding bed of some ancient betrothed couple, which makes Delia feel somehow improper as she sleeps. On the headboard, enclosed in an oval of faded blue, is a small painting of the bed’s original owners, then young and newly married, joining hands in profile. The woman has one long red spit curl, which Delia traces every night in an attempt to find the courage to fit herself into someone else’s surroundings the way Austin says he has.
“You need to get out,” Austin says, roughing his fingers through his hair to dry it. A small lizard clings to the wall behind him. Delia thinks she can hear it trying not to breathe; she sees its small, ticking pulse in the loose skin of its neck. Throughout the first week, Austin tried to show Delia what was wonderful about the house. Just yesterday Austin pointed out a china teapot decorated with tiny blue flowers that could never actually grow in this desert. He picked the teapot up from its brown and white crocheted doily in order to show Delia the detailing. As he lifted the lid, tiny black spiders spilled over the side like some dark liquid. This is a place where people are longing to end up, Austin had told her, denying the spiders with the urgency of his voice. He said it as if coming to this place had been the plan all along, then replaced the lid, catching several black legs underneath. He had gestured toward the window where Delia could see their leathery-faced old neighbor as she watered the spiky plants outside her house from a plastic milk jug. The water seemed to pass from the mouth of the jug directly into the thirsty air.
“I’m leaving,” Austin says, shifting his weight impatiently from one leg to the other as he fools with a shirt cuff. He had signed himself up with a temporary agency the minute they arrived, eager to be productive even for somebody else’s benefit. His current assignment is floor at a department store’s going-out-of-business sale. He sorts towels in the bath section, discerning Sea Foam from Mint. He tells Delia he is pleased that he fits in with his fellow workers, that his boss commented on his “drive,” that in this way he is on the right track to permanent employment. Delia wonders at the way Austin has settled so quickly. She is astonished at the ease with which he holds up objects in the house to her, as if they had always been his and not left behind.
With her own tentative fingers, Delia feels the sponginess of her arm. She is bloated, like a cactus storing water. She looks at Austin’s fingers playing with his shirt, and yesterday afternoon drifts back to her like a vision seen through heat lifting off a highway. Delia had been reading on the couch printed with giant red peacocks in the living room while Austin opened drawers in a nearby table. He’d found an old telephone message that his aunt had written down and said something about how interesting it was that these frivolous things lingered after death. Delia was not paying much attention until she began to feel sure out of the corner of her eye that Austin was making a face. It was a child’s face that said she did not belong, as if she were another child who was too thin or too tall, too fat or too short, and always unable to play the game other children demanded she play. Austin’s head seemed to rock back and forth like a just popped jack-in-the-box, but Delia could not look up to see if this was true.