Callie was first out of Otto’s car. She crossed in front of the headlights where he paused in front of the gate at the far end of his drive. She was wearing a suit. Something about the density of the fabric, the way it clung to her body, made her look thick around the middle. There was a bit more age on her. She was wearing a pillbox hat with a small white bird. It reminded me of something Granny Olga would’ve worn on the train from Schenectady. I recognized it as His Helene’s. The headlights cast a radius around Calli’s body illuminating the old tub in the south pasture, shining, boat-like in the yard.
It was only after Callie and Otto entered the house and the lights were down in their windows that I sat on the piano and flicked on the lamp. The piece was called “Confidence.” It opened as Sterling had once described it to me, with the image of a woman on a proscenium. A long operatic flute of sighs and runs. A few measures in, there was a rest. After the rest, Sterling’d said, the piece began in earnest with a brigade of troops marching. The thing he’d said about this piece is that it contains every emotion in a single page.
Afterward, I stood at the window. For a moment I wondered if Otto was watching, and then I remembered Callie and her pillbox hat.
The TV was nothing but news. I stared absently at the images. The men were at it again in the desert. Oil drums burned in the background. I wanted to understand how far the desert was from the hole in the earth where the Starlings had installed their pool. Where was it in relation? “The Gulf” felt too abstract. Outside, the patches of grass were thick. Long and downy, as though you could sink your fist into them and your pulse would disappear.
The moon was full. In the wind, when the light caught the reeds, the field beyond the marsh looked like a river. The sheen was so thick I thought it might hold me if I stepped out the window and put my weight on it.
The screen flashed to pictures of troops in faded fatigues.
“Captain Miller says anyone who isn’t scared there is a fool. Is everybody scared?” Jennings said to the correspondent. I felt as though he was asking me directly.
I thought of Otto on the porch that night. How he’d taken my head in his hands and stared at my face. How he’d kept wanting to kiss like a sister those afternoons Birdie and I took to the outdoors. One evening shortly after Mother’s return, before supper Birdie and I had made our way to the marsh. The box from the mower was just tall enough that, if we laid down side by side inside of it, Mother couldn’t see us from the porch.
As Mother called out to us over the deck, Birdie crawled on top of me.
“Show me,” she said.
Where she’d seen it I never knew, or perhaps I didn’t care to remember. Perhaps she’d caught Fender and I that afternoon in the box.
What I remembered was the shortness of it, the smallness of her head in my hands, the way she’d tilted slightly to the side as we locked lips.
She’d called it the marriage kiss.
That same evening at dinner Birdie had wanted to show our parents what we’d learned.
“Show them,” she’d said. “How to do it.” Her hair parted across her forehead as she leaned across the table.
I thought, too, of Otto and Callie and their greed. “It’s perfectly quiet here,” said the correspondent on the television. In his golf jacket, he looked as though he were going on vacation, somewhere warm. “No activity whatsoever,” he reported. “Looking out from the hotel where most of the foreign journalists are kept, the lights of the city are still on. You can see to the horizon. Taxi drivers are asking passengers nearly $200 to drive to the Turkish border.”
“A sign of the times,” Jennings said.
I pictured reams of taxis crossing a long drawn-out desert. Their thick yellow paint brocading the dry wastes of air like a fleet of canaries flown south for the winter.
The war began. Large green flares that looked not unlike the fireworks on the Fourth of July set off from the town green. “Lit up like Christmas trees,” the correspondent on the ground described it.
The screen went dark. I switched to another station. “You have no idea how good it is to hear your voice on this remarkable night,” I heard a young news correspondent say. “I’m going to go to the window so that our viewers can stay as much in touch with the scene as possible. I’ve just seen a blue flashing light down on the streets below. You can hear what I can hear, I imagine. More of that eerie silence from before the attack began.”
“Is everything OK with you and the crew?” the man in the suit on the screen said.
“We’re a little excited,” the disembodied voice of the reporter in the Baghdad hotel laughed.
“You’ve had a lot of experience being under attack in Vietnam and other places,” the anchor said.
I couldn’t believe Mother wasn’t there. I stood in the darkness of the living room and stretched toward the ceiling, trying to occupy as much of the house as I could. “Where are you?” I said aloud. “Where is anyone?”
Margaret came back with Mother and Father from the funeral. I watched the headlights turn down the drive. I heard their keys jiggle the front lock. I pictured Mother in the foyer hanging their coats. I imagined Otto sitting in the dark across the street in the armchair in the corner of his bedroom. Bent at the knee with his feet firmly planted, his legs would look like they were waiting for a kid to crawl up into his lap.
“White nights,” he’d say as Callie made her way across the room towards the bed.
An old transistor would be playing in the background. He still kept the game on. Soft enough that you can’t hear the calls, just the occasional roar of the crowd.
Alone in the quiet, he waits for the swing, the steady crack of the bat.
All Callie cares about is the win.
In the bed Otto’s got his wait on, still shirt-tied and clammy. His hands hover, like he’s searching for something bigger than what she is.
When she offers him a seat in the saddle, he says, “These days I’m more of a walking man.”
She thinks what he means is, company: some beers in a dimly lit pool hall.
She thinks what he means is: I’ll stick.
Backlit by the moon, she lets the evening work her body. She takes her time gearing him up. Stands at the window. Smokes a cigarette. Lets him wrap his greed around her.
“This,” she says as he unzippers her dress. “Is the whole of our glory.”
As I walked into the foyer, Margaret and Mother were reclined among the pillows. I wondered if Mother knew yet. I wondered if any of them did.
“I always wanted a boy for my second,” I overheard Mother say from where she and Margaret sat in front of the window. The old blind man drove by in his yellow Volvo on his way home from the funeral.
“Really?” Margaret said. “What would you have done with a boy?”
“I’d have named him Samson,” Mother said.
“Everything is big,” Margaret said.
“My big bruiser,” said Mother. “He was going to pull us out of this mess.”
“Go Samson,” Margaret said.
“Go Uncle Sam,” Mother said.
They chuckled nervously then. That was a good one. I chuckled a little too from my place in the doorway where I had stopped to watch them.
“If you’re going to eavesdrop, why don’t you just join?” Mother said.
I took my place on the cushion where they’d made room.