Nothing Like an Ocean
When two tickets to the over-forty singles mixer at Spivey Independent Christian Church arrived in the mail, Alton Wood thought they were a mistake. Still he couldn't help wondering. He found the discarded envelope arid examined it. It was hand addressed his name and street in slanted turquoise script, the letters neat and wide-looped. None of his high school science students used ink like that, none he had now, none he remembered from recent years. And none wrote so legibly. Perforations along one end revealed where stubs had been removed from each ticket.
"There's no return address," he told his sister Fran when she phoned that evening to ask if he needed laundry done. "The postmark is local, the stamp a World War II airplane. It's flying upside down."
"I hope you saved it," Fran said. "Misprint stamps are valuable."
"It's a normal stamp," he said, "just stuck on upside down. Whoever sent it was careless." His voice caught on the last word, a stupid choice on his part. Ill-considered. Still, not really a choice, just a word after all. For Fran, though, now silent on the line, what a wounding word it must be.
"Save it for me anyway," his sister said finally. He imagined her fidgeting hands, the pained look in her eyes.
"So it wasn't you?" he said. He stretched the coiled phone cord, wiggled it into a damped sine wave. "You didn't send the tickets?"
"You should go. Meet someone. It's time," Fran said. "But no, it wasn't me sent you those tickets."
He hadn't thought she had, not really. For one thing, Wood didn't attend church, hadn't for years, not that one or any other. And technically, he wasn't a single. This she also well knew. And to top it off, he was only thirty-eight. She was the one who'd recently turned forty. Under the loosest of interpretations, he wouldn't qualify for an over-forty mixer for another two years. Not for three years, if one gave "over-forty" its strictest interpretation.
Of course, local Independent Christians weren't known for strict interpretations. In fact, they could be quite flexible in their beliefs, dangerously unstructured, wishy-washy in a way Wood had come to believe religions should never be. Maybe some people liked their religion that way. Not Wood. He preferred commandments to vague guidelines any day.
People baffled Alton Wood. He took great pride in mastering the basics of complex processes in nature, of subatomic phenomena and interstellar dark matter, of the relativistic implications of post- Newtonian time-space. But the seeming randomness of human behavior perplexed him. Lori, for example, the inscrutable woman who was his wife until one day she decided not to be that anymore. After what they'd weathered together, the pain of losing Logan, the son they'd both loved, after surviving that, when the worst was past, then the woman decides to leave. Truly baffling.
Until that day, he'd thought Lori was steady. How often he'd said it -- "Lori, she's the steady one." Yet there she stood, teary in the doorway, suitcase in hand, a volatile being, turning away and careening away from him. The last he'd heard, she was waitressing in Charlottesville, living there with the auto mechanic who'd rebuilt the transmission on her Volvo. Wood often imagined her with him, this slender man with greasy cuffs, the smell of gasoline on his lanky hands, a ropy man with hair poking over his T-shirt neck, a dozen rusty lug nuts weighting his pants pockets, rattling as he walked. It would be a year next month since Lori boarded a Greyhound bus with that man. Kimbro. That was his name. Some days Wood wondered if she'd ever come to her senses, if she'd ever board that bus again and come back.
"Maybe Teresa Click sent those tickets," Fran said.
"They're probably just someone's stupid mistake," he said, ready now to hang up, to forget everything those damn tickets had dredged up.
But Wood didn't tear them up, and he didn't throw them away. Instead, he lay awake that night wondering who sent them. The next morning, when he saw Fran's overloaded Buick angle-parked in front of Fat Momma's Dairy Deluxe, he parked nearby and waited. She came out carrying a Star Wars IV commemorative Super Quencher cup of Coke, a small pastry sack, and a copy of the Louisville Courier-Journal. He hurried across the street.
"Go with me," he said, "to that mixer thing?"
She slid into the front seat and added the newspaper to a pile on the passenger seat. The pile, tall as her shoulders, tilted against the passenger door like a drunk. In the back seat, more mounds of magazines and newspapers, burger and coffee Styrofoam, a plastic bin overflowing with saved junk mail. A tall stack of nested Quencher cups lay across everything. Thumb-sized plastic gnomes with neon hair, bright blue Smurfs, and farm and jungle animals were scattered about the car. A faded plastic cowboy straddled the rear- view mirror support, riding it like a bronco. Cardboard pine trees dangled below, drab red and green, their scents spent long ago.
Fran had always been a collector, a gatherer of things. She'd had limits though. Since the whole sad business with Logan, the quirk had morphed into a kind of manic hoarding. Even Wood acknowledged that now. Still, this was not something he could broach with his sister. Not yet.
"You want me to go?" She opened the sack, took out a jelly doughnut for herself, and extended the gaping sack toward him.
"Friday night," he said, refusing with a gesture. "I'm curious. Aren't you?"
"Just curious, Alton?" She stowed the sack beside her seat.
Okay, maybe Lori was gone for good. He'd concede that it was possible. Maybe this was how his life would be, how his future would be, whatever he could make of it. "You're not curious?" he asked Fran again.
She shrugged and turned the key. "You drive," Fran said. She lifted off of her wood-bead seat cover and twisted her thick torso. Peering over piles, she backed out.
As she parked behind Click's Hallmark Store, it occurred to Fran that she was curious about who'd sent her brother tickets, and that curiosity made her feel uneasy. Nervous. She could bear her life, the one she lived now, if she crusted her days in certainty, confined herself to trivial matters, to acts of little consequence. Curiosity felt like a frivolous, yet vaguely dangerous, thing.
Fran hadn't always been this way. She'd been playful as a child, even wild at times, frighteningly so, thinking back now. She'd broken an arm and dislocated a shoulder falling from the garage roof. Just that, thankfully not her skull. A pale scar still snaked from the hollow of her throat to the middle of her chest, the vestige of a furrow dug by a spear point young Franny had whittled on a catalpa sprout. In high school, she'd often hitchhiked to Somerset, dancing there, sometimes hitchhiking home again. She'd slide into strangers' cars armed only with her faith and a ready smile. She shuddered now, remembering.
The Hallmark store manager, a redheaded widow named Teresa Click, was busy up front with a customer. Fran helped Teresa during busy times, selling scented candles, luminaries, angel figurines, and bright holiday ornaments behind the smaller counter. It was the kind of work Fran had sought -- reasonable hours, little chance of screwing up, minimal consequences if she did.
"Teresa," Fran called when the customer left. "You didn't send my brother tickets to the over-forty mixer, did you?"
Teresa stopped straightening cards, and a puzzled expression settled on her face. "Do I know your brother?"
"Alton Wood."
"That's right," Teresa Click said. She snapped her fingers and made a check mark in the air. "That's who you are."
A damp chill ran through Fran. She drew a deep breath, held it as though swimming underwater.
You're next, Mr. Wood," Candice Knott said. She dipped her scissors in clear blue fluid and dried them on a towel. She shook snippings of Chester Ford's hair from her barber cloth. Warm, fresh smells filled the place, all aftershave, hair cream, and talcum powder.
Lori Wood had always cut Alton's hair, ever since they first married. She'd clip it in the kitchen on the first Friday of each month. After she left, he'd let it grow. Before long, people started remarking about his hair. Was this, they asked, his new look? Such notice made Wood uncomfortable. So he'd started coming to Quick Clips on first Fridays. Then he switched to every second Friday. Haircut days were marked on his kitchen calendar now, scheduled through December.
Candice Knott had been his student five short years ago, pregnant during the spring term, by graduation obviously so. He'd always felt sorry for her, in a paternal sort of way. There was something about how her mouth was made, how her full lips never closed over her prominent teeth. She was perky and chatty all the same, her interest in science as fleeting as the snap of her bubble gum. She does not apply herself. He'd written this on Candice's report card, as he had on many others. Still, an active brain was at work, he'd felt certain, beneath her bright explosion of hair, behind her sadly malformed mouth.
Some days she'd bring her son to the shop. He'd play at the back of the room, where she'd strung a bright yellow plastic play- fence. The boy built towers with blocks and knocked them down with violent delight. Blocks scattered everywhere. Each time he'd survey the destruction he'd wrought, studying the scattered blocks like a riddle. Then he'd rebuild and do it again. This unvarying routine seemed bizarre to Wood and quite immature for the boy, who must now be almost five.
"Wash and clip, Mr. Wood?" Candice asked.
He nodded, and as he sat, he saw a small pocketknife wedged in the crease of the chair. She draped the cutting cloth over him, and he thought to say something about the knife, which he now clasped in his hand. She wrapped his neck with a crisp paper strip, all the while telling him of the rain that was predicted, how needed it was. The knife felt solid in his hand. It felt right, this small knife nestled there, this small and precious thing the world somehow wanted to be his. It was the kind he might have bought Logan one day, if his son had lived. Just for the moment he'd hold on to it, hold it and say nothing.
In the mirror he watched as Candice ran a comb through his hair, which looked thin in the shop's harsh light. It wasn't fast- growing or especially thick. Sometimes the girl's scissors snipped more air than hair. Wood enjoyed these visits though. He liked the feel of her hands lathering his scalp. She'd guide his head, tilt him back to the sink, and spray his hair, the tepid water rinsing the suds away. She'd towel his head, towel it like a wet dog, and he'd feel her strong fingers through the towel, feel in his scalp a rising of blood, a warmth like desire. As she cut his hair, he'd sit as if meditating, his gaze fixed. He'd watch Candice separate plaits of hair, clamp them between fingers, snip the ends. On his neck he'd feel her bubble- gum breath. He'd hear its seashell sound, her exhalations like a lover's in his ear.
Had one other person, he wondered, in the last two weeks touched him? Or had he been, however inadvertently, faithful again to the carefree girl he paid to cut his hair?
All this was pathetic. He knew that. He was pathetic. But it wasn't his fault. The fault of the matter resided in Lori. In Lori and the scraggy mechanic who'd lured her away.