Free Fast Lanes by Jayne Anne Phillips Page B

of her.
    She watches the man with the camera.
    He is one of her first lovers, a man past fifty whose thick curly hair she squeezes tight when they are fucking. Years later she will hear a certain recording of Edith Piaf and remember him above her; the open window, red curtains she can clench. He wants her to feel herself, push her fingers deep. When he comes in hard from the rear she can’t see what is holding her. Then he is unbending very slowly, a worm in a plant. He is amorphous, climbing what he eats. When he speaks to her they pretend he will live forever.
     
13. Hired Help
    S he tells her lovers she was never a child. But 1946. That bleached piano. Ladders discolored in fields. Her father hired help to pick the fruit. Men from the War drifted through towns. One whose dead leg swung from a hip. Climbing, he moved its dumb weight each rung.
    At night the workers were ravenous. Over supper he watched her, thirteen in her mother’s housedress. Later he picked his teeth, blunt nails pearled by the light of the lamp. Caught her arm and pressed it.
    He said Look here girl, this is what you are. And the bitterness was red, with a rim.
    He held out a bowl of the fresh picked cherries. Squeezed one with his thumb. The dark pit sliced the skin. It seemed to surge.
     
14. Heirs
    B y now she owns the farm. But she never goes back to claim it. The house falls in, drops its boards. At night she smells it settle.
    Her father wanted boy children. Aging, her mother birthed stillborn twins. The old man kept them in formaldehyde for a week. Kept a light burning on wooden steps to the basement where he kept his traps and fish hooks.
    He didn’t show it to just anyone, only the family and the neighbors. He held up the jar and big tears rolled down his face. My sons, he said. Their penises were like tiny fingers bruised the color of bowels.
    After the birth her mother locked the door against him. This country, she always said, will fall from within.
     
15. Aqua
    H e writes letters to an address in the Yucatán. He pretends it doesn’t matter where she is.
    If she returns, he tells her, she will find his messages in a post office box he has rented in her name. He describes their street and says he is leaving it. Though it is nearly summer, used furs are displayed on headless mannequins outside the second-hand stores. Cuban children melt crayons in matchbook fires. They dot the cracked sidewalks with aqua. Scarlet. Tangerine.
    He puts her belongings in storage. Cleans out the desk and finds a pair of pale blue stockings rolled up in a drawer. He hangs them in the bathroom and doesn’t touch them again.
     
16. Knots
    H e is at loose ends and visits his family. They are old. Even the cousins are sixty, all of it old. They are small town aristocrats of dwindling means. The old woman in her bed leans heavily on her unbroken hip. She speaks of his father.
    He would be glad you have come.
    I have not come. My friends expect me in France at the end of the month.
    He would be glad you have come, his son.
    She fingers absently a spray of forsythia arched from a vase by the bed. It is the waxy deep yellow of butter melted to a puddle and then frozen. He feels it is violent.
     
17. Trainman
    S he leaves Mexico. She thinks her sight is failing. Each week, boys’ faces in the market wandered on their heads. She takes the train to New York, she tells no one.
    The morning settles its rust. Machines pour grain in Chessie cars, shadows of a cat. A broken diesel on grass tracks is alone. She sees its underwater bulk, a blank furred rock in waving heat.
    Lengthening noon, the long tunnels. A young black woman stiffens in sleep. Hair like a bleached fox, rolled eyes drawn Asian. Her son stands, sways in the bald dark. Why can we get out. When we gonna get out. His mother moans and sucks her breath.
    Columned houses deserted by the tracks. In a doorway, an old man sits in a wheelchair. Cock in his lap a limpid flower. As they go by he waves a rumpled