I take it back and leave it draped like a veil over the doorknob of Maya Phaler’s office.
PHIL STOOPS TO TAKE OFF HIS BOOTS. IT’S THE FIRST WEEK of January, but the neighbors across the street still have their electric nativity set plugged in. They leave it on all day and night and, in the afternoon, there’s a weak and artificial light rising from baby Jesus, as if he’s swaddled in glare, and the Virgin Mary sheds dreary bandages of blue into the cold fog. I shut the door behind him.
“Hi,” he says, a little surly, a little shy. He has thin white lines around his eyes—I’ve never noticed those before—where the sun must not shine. The rest of his face has a winter tan, a wind tan, a reddish bum just under the skin. It makes his hair look even blonder, oddly blond.
“Hi,” I say.
“You sound stuffed up,” he says.
“I’ve been sick,” I say.
I haven’t seen Phil for a few days, not since I went to visit him at Sears, where we had an argument in the break room in front of another salesman. It was Saturday, and Phil had been “working the floor” as he calls it, which means sneaking up on unshaven husbands as they look at the prices on power saws, lawn tractors, dehumidifiers.
The department Phil works in is metal gray. The shelves shine with buffed light and, from floor to ceiling, are filled with the kind of items you might find in a junkyard, or dumped at the side of the road, left in the woods. Wrench sets, claw hammers, hoses, rubber mats to throw on the floor of your car, levelers, flashlights, dolly straps, fireproof safety boxes. You could imagine a grown man in bed beside his wife, a stocking cap on his head—and, above him, in the cartoon bubble that reveals his dreams, a floating menagerie of those items from Sears.
In the bubble above his wife’s sleeping head, there would just be z’s.
I had been standing behind a shelf, among the hand appliances—the planers, strippers, sprayers, drills—when I heard Phil, on the other side, say to someone, “This is the best random-orbit palm-grip sander money can buy,” and I’d laughed out loud.
Phil sold it to the man, who was wearing an orange hunter’s vest and jeans that sagged down over his hips so that, when he leaned over the counter to sign his credit card receipt, I could see the two mounds of the man’s buttocks, and the sad crack between them.
I felt sorry for that man, who kept looking at his palm-grip sander over and over again as Phil rang it up, as though he knew, somewhere in his heart, having done this so many times before in his forty-nine years as a consumer, that he was making a terrible mistake. The palm-grip sander with its random orbit would not turn out to be what he’d wanted, or needed, but he would own it now for the rest of his life. It would hang above his workbench in the basement as another painful reminder of his gullibility, poor judgment, while the waste around him accumulated like rain in old tires, or rusty lengths of pipe in the countryside.
Where would it finally go, I wondered, looking at the overstocked shelves at Sears—all this junk?
Where does it go?
For instance, those tires that are always wearing away, going bald on the highway—where is that rubber when it’s no longer on those tires? Does it fade into the atmosphere—gaseous, a breath of rubbery air inhaled, exhaled? Or does it wrap the road in snakeskin like a jacket? Weren’t we driving, every day, over and over our own shed rubber?
Still, Ohio is crammed with rubber factories—Goodrich, Diamond, Industrial Rubber Inc.—making more and more. Where does it go? Those eraser shavings—ten tons of that must be worn away every year in elementary schools all over America. Those children in their rubber-soled shoes should be knee-deep in that pink ash by now. We all should be—
But we aren’t.
All this stuff, I thought, looking at it, rubbed away, worn away—friction turning our things to weather and air. Where does it go?
It has to go somewhere.
The man left with his palm-grip sander in a gray plastic sack that said SEARS in maroon letters, and Phil, who had been smiling and standing up straight in his striped tie and white shirt, sagged, then glared at me. “What’s so funny?” he asked.
I stopped smiling. “Well, Phil. Doesn’t it strike you as just a little silly: ‘This is the best random-orbit palm-grip sander money can buy?’” I imitated him, a slow baritone. “Just a bit melodramatic, or something?”
“Sorry to be so ridiculous,” he said and turned his back to me. “I can take a break now, if you want to have lunch. If you’re not too clever to have lunch with an asshole like me.”
“Phil,” I said, following him into the break room. “I’m sorry. I completely forgot that you don’t have a sense of humor anymore.”
He turned around fast.
Behind him, a canteen vending machine whirred, warm, its miniature cans of ravioli and SpaghettiOs waiting. I hadn’t meant to sound so mean. He looked like he’d been slapped.
“Just get out of here,” he said, and a salesman at the break room table looked up from his Sports Illustrated with a noodle hanging off his lower lip. Phil made a shooing motion with his hand. “Just go.”
I left.
The automatic doors that led from Sears back to the parking lot hesitated before they opened, and when I walked through them, they tried to close on me, then stopped themselves short before jarring all the way open to let me pass.
“Let’s go upstairs,” I say to Phil now.
“No,” he says. “Let’s just sit in the living room if your dad’s not home.” His feet in their wool socks move nervously over the carpet—nervous, toothless animals. He sits in my father’s armchair in the living room, and I sit across from him on the couch.
“Look,” I say. “We both know this isn’t working out.”
“No,” he shakes his head. “It’s not. You’re too smart for me now, college girl.”
I sigh. This will be harder than I’d hoped it would be, harder than Dr. Phaler would have had me believe. “That’s not it,” I say. “There’s been something wrong a lot longer than that.”
Phil looks like a lifeguard out of work for the winter—wind-tanned, but his hair is turning darker around the roots. For the first time I notice he must be trying to grow a mustache, and I imagine Phil with his bristling, hardware-salesman mustache. The knees of his jeans have begun to wear away, and I try to feel the compassion I used to feel. “Poor little boy with a blind mother,” I remember my mother whispering as she watched him load Mrs. Hillman into a car to drive her to a doctor’s appointment, folding her into the passenger seat in her big winter coat, stuffing her in.
But Phil seems weak to me. I used to imagine a little satin heart with his name embroidered on it in my chest. A pincushion. A souvenir. The kind of thing you might buy in a gift shop, something that says “Las Vegas” or “Be Mine.” But now, there’s a cold, white stone in there instead—as if, during an apathetic kiss, something dead from inside him had slipped into my mouth, and I’d swallowed it whole.
It didn’t used to be like this.
I could still remember dancing with him in the gym: How young we’d been! A sudsy bloodbath of energy. Fat, in my pink dress, I was a sad valentine made by a child, made out of cotton balls, dime-store doilies, and paste—sentimental, pathetic, a little desperate, but sincere. And Phil was stooped but not yet bent, jerking to the music in his blue tux. Whatever burdens he already had, they did not seem permanent.
And all those sweaty nights on the couch, his kisses like blurred stars all up and down my neck. I was still fat. Together we were wading into a tepid lake. Carefully. The mud was soft and as loose as flesh.