Jim and Nadine, Nadine and Jim
They were watching the earthquake news and she jumped up out of her chair.
Don’t start! Jim said. Don’t start!
I can’t watch! Nadine said. The orphanage! They need help! Her brown hair was short and ragged next to her face and she hopped up and down from one foot to the other to keep herself from running away.
Stand still! Jim said. He sank his hand into the bowl of cheezies and crunched his fist closed. The hand was orange with cheezy dust right up to the wrist.
Nadine stepped onto a nearby beanbag cushion and stood absolutely still.
I’m fine, she said from her cushion. Don’t worry, Jim, I’m fine, I’m fine.
On the television, babies were stacked on bakers’ racks because there were no more mattresses. Their little blankets were damp and streaked with grime, but overall the babies did not look any more unhappy than regular babies. They were tucked in close on the shelves. The orphanage had been knocked down by the earthquake.
Smashed flat, Nadine said, and she punched herself in the chest—a double-fist punch.
You’re all mixed up! Jim said. You don’t know what’s going on! Rest and relax, rest and relax, that’s what I always say! He leaned forward in his armchair, elbows on knees, hands out flat. There wasn’t much meat on him. He was a tall enough guy with big hands.
It’s my heart! Nadine said. She coiled down onto the cushion like a little warm bun.
Chrissakes, Jim said, his flat hands wavering back toward the cheezy bowl. Run a tub.
Nadine scooped her knees into her chin and held onto her ankles.
Don’t cry! Jim said. You know how that upsets me! His mouth was all orange. Don’t cry, do your grounding! Jesus, feel your feet!
In moments of panic Nadine had been taught to stand up and feel the pressure of her whole body bearing down through her calves and feet. This was called grounding; she was meant to feel grounded as opposed to, Nadine thought, airborne. Nadine found more comfort in an airborne self, a self that could float up and away from frightening things, but the therapist said, No: Nadine needed to push all the fear out through her toes.
I’m turning off the TV, Jim said, but he didn’t. On-screen, a white doctor was talking about all the legs he’d cut off since the earthquake. If a person’s leg was caught under a rock or a piece of broken concrete, it was the doctor’s job to cut off the leg, and there wasn’t any anaesthetic because the wrong boats had got to the island first.
Aren’t you traumatized? the reporter asked and the doctor said, Yes yes the screaming was very hard to ignore.
He doesn’t even look like a doctor, Jim said. Where is his coat?
Nadine pulled up and fixed her feet flat on the ground.
I feel my feet, Nadine said. She was already crying.
Nadine flattened both hands over her mouth to hold the crying down. I feel my feet, she said into the hands.
Just don’t look! Jim said. Look out the window. He took off his t-shirt and tied it in a big knot, pulling tight on the two ends, and he walked up the stairs like that, tearing at the ends of the shirt. When he got to the bedroom, he stood under the doorjamb and bounced on the balls of his feet. Nadine! he yelled down the stairs. Are you still crying?
Nadine pressed her fingers harder against her mouth, until she could feel her teeth, flat and even, on the other side.
Out the window, the schoolbus stopped and all its flashing lights were on. Cars lined up behind it. A little girl with dark hair and a blue backpack stepped off the bus and crossed the street. The girl was only about as tall as the bus tires, but the driver saw her, so it was okay. He didn’t run over the girl. No other cars squashed the girl, either. On the other sidewalk, there was a woman with long hair and a little dog on a green leash waiting for her.
On the television, three men were beating a fourth man for stealing a bag of corn.
What if I stay upset forever? Nadine said to her hands. She used her imagination to build a wall in the hallway, halfway between her body and the bedroom. She laid the wall brick by brick and licked the mortar off her finger. It was white and coarse, like the rock dust on the people’s legs on television.
Nadine sat down on the couch and picked up the remote and shut off the TV. She pulled her knees up tight to her chest and rubbed her shins. The bumpiness of the shin-bone always made Nadine think of her spine. The shin = the spine of the leg. She rubbed downwards, so any leftover fear would know what direction it ought to travel.
That brick wall calmed her right down.
Jim came pounding down the hall wearing his jacket.
It’s supposed to be me that makes you feel better, Jim said. His keys jingled in his coat pocket where his hand was shaking them around. Why won’t you let me make you better?
He stood with his thighs against the arm of the couch. Nadine looked at the waistband of his jeans, slumping low over his hipbone. The hip looked like a horn. Jim held out his big hand and Nadine let him wrap it around her small one. She thought about the bricks in her wall. Their crumbling weight; the sharp edges and grainy mortar. It didn’t matter now about the earthquake because at least Jim wasn’t mad. She leaned her cheek against his hip.
Jim said, Nadine! What if you stay upset forever?
Jim had not always been Nadine’s boyfriend. He had first, and for a period of some months, been the boyfriend of Nadine’s sister, until the sister decided to hone her skills as a shell-game aficionado. She moved to the coast based on the quite reasonable assumption that it would be easier to acquire shells in an oceanic environment. Now of no-fixed-address, she house-sat on houseboats when the owners came ashore for bungalow vacations, and lived very well like this with a new boyfriend and a trained black parrot named Hollister.
Jim first met Nadine at Christmas, the family dinner.
Nadine is sen-si-tive, the sister had whispered across the table to where Jim sat. Nadine next to him, wearing a crown made of red tissue paper, had flashed him her tiny teeth. Jim patted Nadine’s shoulder and then her knee and, later on when the sister stepped out for some soothing ginger ale, he patted most of the rest of Nadine’s body as well. It was a good arrangement and suited them fine, and when the sister climbed into her car and pointed west, it only made sense for Jim to come and live at Nadine’s house full-time.
Nadine offered him her keys and Jim put them in his pocket.
Now Nadine showed Jim that she was not upset forever. She did this by smoothing his eyebrow hairs until they were silky and stray-free as little eye-toupees. Jim took her panties off and they settled in. He jumped forward a little with his hips and every time he did she gave a little equal-and-opposing jump. She bit his beard. Things went on like this for some time. She wrapped her arms around him and pushed her fingers against his tailbone, the boniest place on his whole bony body, and pressed down, holding him inside her.
Nadine thought about how Jim tasted. How he tasted all the same—his mouth and tongue were no different than his cum. His shoulders slammed downward and she thought, Your inside parts taste the same as your outside parts. I will never get tired of fucking you. But then after a few minutes she went back to repeating words in her own head. She bites his beard, she bites his beard, she thought to herself. Normally Nadine didn’t allow this kind of indulgence but she was too tired to come, anyway. The earthquake had exhausted her. Jim pulled out and wiped some blood off his dick and Nadine said Oh would you look at that, then swung her legs onto the floor and went to mark the calendar.
They went to the pub for dinner. Nadine turned the newspaper over so that the front cover lay flat against the table. Whatever the cover has to show, Nadine said, the table can look at it. She liked to read the horoscope and the Ann Landers reprints. On her way to the bathroom the bartender smiled at her. He had brown eyes and was eating curry chips; Nadine could smell the curry. His mouth curved and he licked the gravy from his thumb.
Sometimes Nadine came in and had a pint on her own, if Jim was sleeping and wouldn’t notice she was gone. Once she had sat at the bar and cried over the crossword, because she’d done it all in pen and it was wrong and needed fixing, and the brown-eyed bartender had brought her a slice of pie. You’re just a wee little thing, the bartender had said. And you push yourself awfully hard.
Now Nadine only walked by him, because Jim was there of course, but she raised her own thumb to her sweet, tiny teeth and bit down. She went into the bathroom and sat for a moment, and then she wiped her bum and washed her hands and walked back to the table. Jim was eating a burger and Nadine had chicken fingers. She picked up a slice of lemon and squeezed the juice all over her meat.
If you don’t start paying attention to me, Jim said, I’m going to have to start seeing other women on the side.
That Suzanne Grady, Jim said. She’s always trying to sit in my lap.
Nadine looked over at Suzanne, who was their waitress. Suzanne was leaned up against the bar, twirling a string of blonde hair around one finger and staring at the teletype news on a screen mounted over her head. There was a piece of banana-meringue pie on the bar in front of her and the bartender was eating it and reading the sports. He lifted the meringue layer off with his fork and the banana custard went down in two bites.
I gave you a blowjob last night, Nadine said. A long one. What are you talking about?
Jim said: Yeah, a blowjob, but was it sincere?
Nadine said she wasn’t sure how a blowjob could be more sincere.
I think you’ve given better blowjobs in the past, to other guys you knew before you knew me, Jim said. I get all your leftover blowjobs. What’s wrong with you, anyway?
You are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, here, Jim. Nadine crunched a carrot stick and it was very angry crunching. You can have Suzanne if you want her. She looks like a horse.
Ridden hard and put away wet, Nadine said.
Then Jim pushed up to leave and Nadine had to beg him on her knees to stay because she had left her wallet at home, she didn’t even have her wallet and who was going to pay for all these chicken fingers and burgers?
Across the room, the brown-eyed bartender looked up, his fork quivering with meringue.
One lousy burger, Jim said. But he went with Nadine to the bar and paid, because she was really on the verge of being upset and she might stay upset forever and then what would he do? Suzanne Grady took the money and made change with her belt. Her hands took the cash and went into the pockets on the belt and came out again with coins. She was able to do all of this without taking her eyes off the teletype.
Jim put the coins down on the bar. Nadine noticed that the bartender had left a sliver of meringue and that he had folded up the sports. The bartender kept his eyes on Jim but his sugary plate moved slyly along the bar toward Nadine. Her finger inched toward the leftover pie. Jim turned to go and she popped the meringue in her mouth. Where it exploded and melted away, Nadine thought, all at once.
They walked up the hill to home.
You’re a fucking cow, that’s you, Jim said. You’re an ice-heart bitch.
I don’t even know what I’ve done wrong, Nadine said. We were eating lunch, she said. She wished he’d left her at the bar. She wished he’d left her there, in some way that was not her fault.
Jim tore at a hangnail with his teeth and spat it onto the sidewalk. When he walked uphill, his arms hung funny, loose and long like an ape’s—a thing Nadine always noticed but didn’t bother saying out loud.
Another thing: that he said “foil-age” instead of “fol-iage.” She had a secret list.
It was warm out and an old lady in her front yard stopped pulling weeds to watch them go by, Nadine taking three steps to each one of Jim’s.
When they got up to the house, he took the stairs two at a time and threw himself against the bed, flipped open his computer and said: Go away. I don’t love you anymore.
There was a pause. Jim looked at his computer screen, and Nadine looked at Jim.
Nadine said: Just remember you’re the one who said it, and then that was that. She ran down the stairs, but remembered she didn’t have her car keys and dragged herself back up to the bedroom again.
Jim was standing in the closet, tearing her French Maid costume into pieces. He looked up: You’ll have to get something new for the next guy!
His eyebrows were messy, as though he had been taking a long nap. In fact, the opposite was true, Nadine thought. His eyebrows were working entirely too hard.
She left the house walking. There were tulips everywhere, beginning to fade: the petals were limp and looked burnt along their edges. The sagging petals were like wobbly limbs, Nadine thought. It was too bad flowers didn’t have shins. Those tulips needed backbone.
She came home when it was dark. Jim maybe sleeping.
Sleeping his mood off, Nadine called it. Sometimes he slept for days. She was in the kitchen holding marshmallows over the toaster when she heard a knock, and then another and another. Nadine licked the sugar from her fingers. The knocking wasn’t the front door, it was upstairs, like in a scary story where the phone rings and rings and then the operator tells you to get out of the house.
You could make a movie of my life, Nadine said to the toaster, and she went up the stairs to where the knocking was.
Nadine, Jim said. It’s Jim.
But she couldn’t see Jim. He was still in the bedroom. Nadine tried the knob and it turned, but the door wouldn’t open. For a second she stood quiet and still. It did not seem a completely bad thing to find Jim’s body on one side of a door, and her own body on the other.
It was true she’d be in trouble if she didn’t get him out.
She pushed her thin frame up against the door. She gave it shoulder. Nothing.
The door’s stuck, she said.
Jim, on the other side, let drop a few curses. Then: I’ve nailed it shut.
Where did you get the nails?
For fuck’s sake, I been peeing in the garbage can. Can you not knock the thing down?
Nadine: I’m just a wee little thing, Jim.
You’re not, you’re massive!
I’ll call someone to come around and help me?
No!
Well, then, Nadine said. I’ve seen you put your fist through a wall easily enough. Get yourself out of there. Use a double-fist punch, how ’bout?
Jim said that if he could get an arm through that door and around Nadine’s neck, he’d be a happy man, and Nadine imagined just the lanky ape-arm with no Jim attached waving around on her side of the door, covered in rubble and trying to find her throat. I’ll just run a tub, then? Nadine said.
She said: Rest and relax, Jim. Remember?
Nadine locked herself in the bathroom and opened the window. With both doors shut, bedroom and bathroom, she could barely hear him cursing. (He would kill them both, Jim said. Nadine was fucked as a dead horse and half to her grave.) She squirted a heavy dose of dish soap into the tub for bubbles. The night outside her window was warm and black, and she turned the light off in the bathroom, too, to see how dark it would get.
She shook her dress down to the floor.
There was the streetlight or the moon. Nadine caught herself in the mirror for just a second and then stayed there a while looking at all her parts: the hard edge of her collarbone, the shoulder, the strict knot of bicep tapering to the eye of her elbow. She firmed up her fist and the bicep tightened; a little more tension and it popped out, round and shadowed. Nadine let the hand drop. She reached for a white towel where they were tucked in close on the shelf. She was surprised at her body, how good it was: small and thin and curved. The bones curved.
A real looker, she was. Banana pie.
Jim was silent now.
Nadine looked down. It was a lovely bath, the bubbles light as meringue, light as marshmallows resting on the lip of the tub. She touched it with just a toe, then pulled back again. Her knuckles swept the line of her hip.
Out in the night, Nadine imagined the brown-eyed bartender looking up. Her knees locked. Naked and invisible in the black bathroom window, tiny and grounded, just a wee little thing: she reached forward and flipped the switch.
I feel my feet, she whispered to the cool outdoors.
The room swelled with light.
