That night Caroline told me the story of her body. We lay in bed. Candles burned on the nightstand. The smell of lavender filled the room.
“This scar,” she said, brushing her index finger across her forehead. “I got when I was seven. My mom had this footstool shaped like a mushroom.”
“A mushroom,” I said with a laugh. “What color?”
“Orange. I danced on top of it to that Marlo Thomas song. The one about being tiny…”
I didn’t know that one.
“It tipped and I crashed into the stereo.”
“Ouch.”
“Besides cutting my forehead, I dented the stem of the mushroom, and worse, scratched the record,” Caroline sighed, still mourning. “That was my favorite song.” She touched my shoulder. “Don’t you remember? Stop licking me, and I’m tiny!”
“I wish I did.”
I did remember our first date. Caroline opened the door of her apartment wearing only a pair of sweat pants and papakha. The hardwood floor piled with leaves she’d gathered that day because she liked the rustling sound underfoot. Surprised to find her topless, that my reaction wasn’t sexual I found more surprising. I accepted, as I would a wink, her casual invitation to intimacy. She apologized for the failure to correctly prepare the meal we’d discussed and would I instead like to go to the neighborhood Indian restaurant. I accepted her proposal and suggested that despite the autumn evening perhaps it was too warm for wearing the tall fur hat.
“Listen.” Caroline pulled my head against her right shoulder. She then rotated the shoulder in a circle and it clicked like a playing card attached with a clothespin to a bicycle wheel.
“What happened?”
“When I was ten, the neighborhood bully dared me to jump four garbage cans on my bike. He was cute with freckles and reddish hair. I cleared the cans, but my back wheel was too high when I landed. I came down hard on my shoulder. It might actually have separated, but mom didn’t take me to the doctor.” She rotated it again and the shoulder clicked. “Ever since then it’s made a funny noise.”
“Stop it!” I said, cringing. I took hold of her arm and as I pulled it straight noticed in the candlelight scars, faded ribbons across her wrist.
“What is it?” she asked.
I didn’t answer.
Caroline turned her hands palm down on the mattress and looked at me. She had a certain look. It was a forgiving look – that’s important – a look not found in a lover’s face or a friend’s, but only in the mirror, and only after much practice.
One summer afternoon Caroline arrived at my house in tears. A kitten wrapped in her jacket. She pounded on the door until I answered. The kitten had crawled up under her car. From her rearview mirror, she saw it fall and roll to the shoulder of the road. Caroline pulled over and ran back to help, but it was already dead. I placed the kitten in an empty shoebox that Caroline lined with rosemary she took from the neighbor’s yard. We drove to a park that had a secluded grove and buried it near a blackberry bush. She still visited the grave.
On her left breast I saw a tattoo of four Classical Greek pillars. “Tell me about this one, it’s beautiful.”
“That’s my first one. I got it to remind me how important it is to treat my heart with respect and let no one trample it.”
Just below her bellybutton was another tattoo of two words. “How do you pronounce this?”
“Meu fractu.”
“What language is it?”
“Portuguese, the Brazilians have over seventy phrases for states of arousal. That one’s my favorite.”
“What does it mean?”
“Butterflies in the stomach.”
Each letter I traced with my tongue as Caroline paused from her narrative. I continued kissing lower, past the tattoo, lower and then, lower still. The tangy taste of baked almonds bit back at me and I would have stayed had she not called me to return. She tilted back my head and pulled me toward her face until our eyes met. Afterward, I pressed my ear against that depiction of ancient architecture tattooed to her chest and listed as Caroline’s heartbeat slowed to normal.
Caroline guided my hand down her left leg where four divots formed a square around her knee. “Feel that?”
“Yeah.”
“When I totaled the motorcycle, pins were put in to set the leg. Right after that was a birthday party at the house of a boy I had a crush on. I showed up on crutches with a cast to my mid-thigh, decked out in a little black party dress. We danced to AC/DC in the backyard.”
I shifted in bed.
“I’m sorry,” she said and pressed her leg against mine. “It’s not polite to talk about the past after sex.”
Politeness aside, I often thought of the past after sex. I met Caroline at an open mike performance. She played guitar and sang a song about crossing the country on her uncle’s Indian motorcycle. I read a non sequitur poem about memory and the sense of smell. After the show, we closed the bar. I sat on her lap at the bus stop as she tried teaching me the opening chords to “Sweet Jane”. We kissed. Caroline tasted of Stoli and lime and made me thirsty. After watching her bus drive away, I stumbled home. The next day I discovered that she wrote her phone number on my poem. I always discovered things with Caroline.
We held each other and watched the wick burn itself out long after the wax was gone. The smell of lavender remained. “When I got out of hospital,” Caroline began. “They had me on meds. There were ones to wake me up and ones to put me to sleep and ones to keep me from doing any harm again.” She pressed against me. “It was a very hot summer. There was this mean old tomcat in the neighborhood. I called him Napoleon because even though he was a scrawny little thing everyone, even dogs, was afraid of him. I was the only one he ever allowed to pet him. I was sitting in the shade on the cool concrete of our stoop when Napoleon came staggering over to me. He was shivering and coughing. A whitish film coated his eyes. I watched him die of heatstroke. It was as if I was a camera. I could record events as they unfolded but couldn’t react. I loved that cat. To watch him die and not even register a yawn horrified me. At least, I remembered there was a time in my life it would have horrified me. After that, I secretly quit taking the pills.” She squeezed my hand. “I knew what I was doing. I knew there was a chance, a good chance, that I might hurt myself again, but to not feel again wasn’t living either.” Caroline settled into me. “The smell of lavender calmed me. I began getting lavender-scented things; candles and incense, even tried growing lavender in a box outside my window. Lavender became a reminder of who I was, what I was capable of, and why I needed to remain wakeful.”
“That isn’t easy.”
“No, but necessary.”
To find someone with qualities you want is one thing and quite another thing to find someone with qualities you need, but for you to realize you’ve found someone who has the qualities you need is maturity. I felt old, not for the first time, but it was the first time I felt proud to feel that way. That night I told Caroline I loved her.
# # #
Ace Moore writes fables, flash, and other short stories. He participated in Seattle’s Jack Straw Writing Program, which included publication in an anthology as well as a performance broadcast on the local NPR station. He received an MFA from Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His works have appeared in a number of anthologies and literary magazines, all of which have since disappeared.
Photo: Milada Vigerova
[…] José Enrique Medina Todd Mercer Leonie Milde Andrew Miller Bruce Miller Ruben Miranda-Juarez, Jr. Ace Moore Cecil Morris KG Newman J.R. Night Quentin Norris Stephen O’Donnell Jude Okonkwo Angelica A. […]