Disremembering
The smell lodging from the farmer’s market is one Tim came to know roughly ten years ago when he was still a trucker. It was in Indianapolis and when the strange woman opened her legs, desperation wouldn’t allow the smell to dissuade him. She hadn’t minded his bum knee or the hair on his arms. She hadn’t minded that he only lasted five — maybe six — minutes. Now, though, as he passes through the argent bodies of dead fish, he reluctantly continues to look around until coming across a hand-dipped fudge stand. The woman, black and glazed as the cart she is selling from, smiles at him with warm brown eyes. “Omemade,” she speaks in a thick Nigerian accent.
“I’ll take a container.” $7.56 later, he walks on a trail that circles around itself in the shape of an infinity sign with fountains in the middle of each oval: one of a cupid aiming, the other of a cupid holding its own bottom as if it has been struck. After the fish lady in Indiana, he had returned days later to a cold pot of Folgers and an empty house. Then, his gut only hung slightly past his waist, and he had taken a long look at himself after a pleasant cry in the shower. That had been his first time ever cheating. By now, he’s done it at least two or three more times. He doesn’t remember when Beverly’s approval became impossible to get. Even now, he sighs at the idea of not finishing the fudge and discarding its remnants before returning home, certain she’ll give him a sharp glare for his dieting choices. She believes stir-fry to be a holy grail and never misses a day to consume green-colored smoothies that just make him think of vomit. Maybe tomorrow he’ll get that gym membership.
***
When he gets home, Beverly’s parents are putting their things away in the guest bedroom. He exchanges warm hugs with both of them, always happy to find their good spirits in his house. Having been himself raised by foster parents, one of the things he’s always liked about Beverly is her accessibility to an extended family that she never minded sharing. Now, though, she grumbles around the house, constantly exhaling and smoothing her hair off her forehead. He happens to look in her direction as she notices the fudge on the counter, stares at him, and points to it. “For your parents,” he shrugs. She doesn’t look back down as she chops some celery on a cutting board.
“Half-eaten?” she asks.
“So I wanted to try it first. They don’t exactly give samples at the farmer’s market.”
“I go there more than you do. They give samples all the time.”
“Things fucking change,” he mutters while heading back outside.
He sits in a wicker chair, the throw pillow in it flat against his weight. The essence of rain touches down on everything not sheltered by walls and with a head tilt, he drifts into sleep. In his dream, three red horses gallop across a desert and swirl into the form of three plastic chairs in an all-white office where he, Beverly, and a man in a white medical coat sit. They’ve just been given the news; a phrase he hasn’t heard in thirteen years inches its way out of the doctor’s mouth, close-captioned by blood. “Cerclage…will close cervix…” He looks closer at the doctor’s words on the white floor; chunks of an infant lay against the linoleum inside the blood pools.
He is shaken by a firm hand. “Tim, Tim, get up. Beverly says dinner is ready.” He jerks out of the dream, rubs his hands across his thighs, and gets up from the chair. The rain outside is heavy and pelting as he closes the backdoor. He and Beverly take their usual seats at the table, both at opposite ends as her parents sit right next to one another, purposely brushing their hands together when passing a bowl of green beans and the salt-shaker. They smile into one another’s breaths and laugh at a forty-year joke only their eyes understand.
“Why don’t you like me anymore?” he asks across the table, the scent of love now dissipating, masked by meatloaf and undusted furniture.
“What?” Beverly asks, the sound more of a laugh than a word. No one’s eyes leave hers.
“Why don’t you like me anymore?”
She looks from her parents to Tim in horror. The surprise passes as she replaces her eyes with homicidal slits. “You’re a grown man. What kind of question is that?”
She jerks from the table, tossing down her fork against a full plate.
The silence left from her departure exudes enough energy to create another being. It grows heavy in the room, taps him on the shoulder. Says, “Get up, you idiot. Go fix it. Why are you still sitting here?” He doesn’t move and continues to eat a tasteless dinner with Beverly’s parents.
***
Beverly is smoking in bed and looking through a small, leather photo album when he finally comes into the room.
“I thought you were quitting.”
“Hm.”
“I didn’t know you still had that,” he points to the album.
“Hm.”
“Stop.” She closes the album and flicks the end of the cigarette above the ashtray on the night table.
“What do you want me to say, Tim?”
“I just want you to talk to me.”
“You don’t give a damn about what I have to say.”
“How do you figure?”
“Tim, you blame me, okay? You blame me for everything and you know you do.”
“Oh, my God — ”
“And I wish you would just say that instead of pretending to want me or our life.”
“So that’s what this is about? You think I blame you for your medical complications?”
“I know you do!” she shouts at him, tears staining the white in her eyes to an irritated pink. “The funny thing is,” she talks lowly now, scornful. “The funny thing is that I’m glad I couldn’t have a baby by you. You’d still be running around. Well that is if you looked half as good as you used to.”
“You’re wrong talking to me like that.”
“Yeah?” she puffs the cigarette viciously. “I don’t see it.”
He steadies himself against the frame of the bed.
“Stop playing victim in a situation you created, Tim.” He dry-heaves and finally allows his body to quiver as he cries. Beverly watches him. “If I could forget,” she speaks up quietly, “I would.” She returns to her photo album, to her smoking, to her disdain for him.
***
He’s too proud for therapy, too tired for a divorce. He searches for hours, clicking anxiously on links. There’s a man in Lyson that owns a shack for tarot card readings and other bullshit he never believed in. The way he found out about him was through one of Beverly’s superstitious friends he doesn’t care for. She’d made mention of the man several times at birthday dinners and other events that he was dragged to to schmooze with Beverly’s friends and their awkward husbands. She’d jokingly said the man had a cocktail or spell—something that would make you forget your deepest regrets.
When he can’t find anything, he decides that tomorrow will be the time for them to just try and start over. He writes a note and slides it under the bedroom door. He washes all the dishes. He cries quietly in the bathroom before scrubbing it from top to bottom. The house is foreign to him in every way possible. How did he go so long without noticing the cracks in the walls? That the hamper where they keep towels is lopsided? When did the soap scum become a permanent fixture on the shower walls?
Making a late-night run for limescale cleaner will only take a few minutes. He searches relentlessly for his keys, his wallet. Neither turn up. He peeks outside. His truck isn’t there. As a last resort, he walks into the bedroom only to find a made-up bed. He sits on it flustered, trying to remember who had been there just hours before.
Andrea Jefferson is a creative residing in Southern Louisiana. Her chapbook Stray Curls and Dirty Laundry was released digitally in 2018.
