The Mechanics of Falling and Other Stories

2007)

Looking for a Female Tenet

The first night they thought about going home. But Jules and Mary Lee told themselves there was a finite limit on their time in hell. Jules had gotten them the summer job by writing in answer to an ad—easy hours waitressing at a rustic lodge, free room and board in the beautiful foothills of the Sierra Nevada—and as soon as they were shown to the room they were expected to share, they understood their mistake. The room was in a hall off the restaurant kitchen and smelled of grease from the cooking vents, effluence that had bubbled and stained the wallpaper, and the bare mattresses on the cots looked as if they'd been stuffed with straw and carelessly sewn up. Mary Lee checked the bathroom: a rust-stained sink and a toilet ringed with grime and no shower.

But to turn around and go back. Mary Lee would have had to return to her parents' house with her five brothers and sisters, share a room with her older sister who was working as a bank teller and still fighting with the younger kids for her spot on the sofa. Jules had just the one older brother and a sprawling suburban home, but she would not live under her parents' roof.

Beating dust from the mattresses, Jules said that a summer with their families, this last summer before they graduated from Stanford and were completely free, also meant doing hard time.

They keep their house cold as hell in summer, my parents, Jules said. Three months of my mother asking me please not to raise my voice. Singing out my name whenever she wants me. Joo-lee. And wanting to know when she's going to see the benefits of my expensive education. She's got the whole country on her side now. Reagan's in the White House, smiling away. Everyone else is cheerful.

I get it, Mary Lee said. Worse hell.

That was the deal. Jules believed her. Mary Lee had shed the shame she felt in high school, wanting no one to see that house she came from, cramped as the belly of a ship, listing with every grievance of her father's—and so many had flared for so long that even he forgot why—and had learned to tell it as if it were more awful than it was, gauge of how far, how fast she had come. She'd marshaled her story even if she wasn't sure how to brush off what else clung to her, like grains of sand to damp skin: the feeling of being wholly owned by a mother who buttoned you into blouses and licked her thumb to press your eyebrows flat; the pleasure of devouring bread fried in Crisco and sprinkled with sugar, a treat; the reflex of cringing at the nearness of a father who'd smack you as quick as he would any of the others, not bother to single anyone out.

Standing in the room Jules could shrug off as no worse than what she'd face at home, Mary Lee heard her father, expecting from his children what he did not expect from himself when he was thwarted: No use crying over spilt milk.

At the beautiful resort the parched mountains glared with reflected sunlight; the sky did not change from one day to the next; the lodge was musty and dark inside; and most of their customers came from the adjacent campground, where the stammering noise of TVS and radios floated from campers and tents all day long. Jules and Mary Lee worked two shifts, from twelve to two and from six to midnight. In summer the manager kept the bar open late and hired a rock band, which drew locals too, young men from the ranches in the foothills who wore cowboy hats, girls who dressed in too-tight jeans and ringleted their hair around a curling iron. It was true, what the manager had written to Jules, that here you could go out at night and see a sky you'd never glimpse in the city, oppressively populated, afflicted with a rash of dim stars.

Jules had a car, her parents' old Ford sedan; they would get away on their days off. They rolled out of bed at eleven and put on their waitress uniforms, peach cotton dresses that buttoned up the front and little white aprons. The dresses had darts at the waist to give them an hourglass shape that Jules filled out but Mary Lee did not. They entered the blissfully air-conditioned restaurant at eleven thirty to swill coffee before helping Ginny, the real waitress, whose years on her feet had left her with a grim face and a body disconcertingly lean and supple. On the question of their competence, Ginny seemed indifferent; the most fellow feeling she could muster was the occasional muttered epithet cockaroach when one of the customers, hers or theirs, behaved badly. At two o'clock Jules and Mary Lee took off their aprons and left Ginny on her own. Sometimes they swam in the pool behind the lodge, but more often they lay on their nun-like beds and read. At six Mary Lee and Jules returned to the restaurant to work the dinner rush, and then, after Ginny left at eight, they served drinks and an occasional hamburger to anyone who showed up to hear the band. It was never all that crowded. They could chat behind the counter or sometimes dance with each other on the tiny dance floor.

Their room was hot at night, and mosquitoes got in through the shredded window screen. Mary Lee was pure Irish, though you had to go back two generations to find anyone in her family who had dared to cross an ocean, and she had the Irish allergic reaction to mosquito bites. Between the heat and the whine of insects, she couldn't sleep. She was ashamed to be so bothered when Jules slept fine. In the first week, when they thought they could make some money off tips, Ginny posted a note on the corkboard by the cash register: looking for a female tenet, quite and friendly. Jules asked about the room for rent, tried to cajole Ginny into letting her and Mary Lee share it for the summer. Ginny tapped sugar packets into a neat row in a dispenser. You're not Christians, she said.

They couldn't have afforded the rent anyway. The people from the campground rarely left more than a dollar on the table, and the locals counted out tips in coins that weighted Mary Lee's pockets by the end of her shift, and even at night when most of their customers were drunk they did not forget to be parsimonious. One night as Mary Lee and Jules sat on their beds, counting out the change they'd spilled from the deep pockets of their uniforms, Mary Lee began to cry. She had calculated the minimum she needed to make in order to afford to go back to school, and at this rate she'd fall short.

Jules said, That's the hold your working-class background has on you. Everything won't get taken away from you in one fell swoop. Don't panic.

At the end of every semester Jules woke to the fact that she might not pass her courses, pulled all-nighters to write papers, crammed desperately in the library, took cold showers to force her mind to alertness. Mary Lee maintained a straight-A average at an unwavering pace.

She said, I can't afford to panic.

Jules waved a hand. That doesn't always make you one up on me.

Jules and Mary Lee had met in an art history class last year. Jules had wanted Mary Lee to teach her the trick of discerning which facts they'd be expected to spit out on a test, as if the slide shows and field trips to art galleries were aimed at this winnowing. So Mary Lee talked to Jules about Giotto and Masaccio—not on the course list—and how van Gogh could make her cry, and Jules got it: once you knew you could, you spent the fortune amassed in those facts, recklessly. In this realm Mary Lee did not have it in her to knuckle under. She was quick to suggest the emperor had no clothes when their professor took the class to an exhibit of photographs, women's crotches shot from every conceivable angle. Ugly. Obscene. Feminist statement, my ass, she'd protested to Jules. But Jules said it was fantastic, the way the photographs refused to eroticize female genitals and activated discomfort. This time it was Mary Lee who needed instruction, who studied the photographs again, the yoke of her modest Irish mother around her neck.

If Jules did not make the expected weekly phone call to her parents, Mary Lee wrote to her mother every Sunday after they finished the lunch shift. She commiserated with her mother about her surreptitious nighttime trips to stuff garbage bags in trash cans on street corners because her father had decided the city had no right, no right, to charge for trash collection before the service was provided. She described the blue jay she and Jules had inadvertently taught to screech at their window every morning by feeding it cracker crumbs, and she added a line about the stars at night, the as-advertised stars.

When they swept aside their fistfuls of change that night, Jules promised, Summer's not over yet. She cut the shoulder pads from a shirt and stuffed them in her bra, and when it improved her take, she made Mary Lee do the same. The men in shorts who came in with a wife and bickering kids were the most likely to reward flirtation. The ranchers went for a combination of wide-eyed innocence and pinned-up hems. And if Mary Lee and Jules served up a Coke or a side order of fries and didn't charge for it, a few extra quarters would be left on the table by every person who believed he'd gotten away with something. The two of them made only a few more dollars a week, but that came to be beside the point.

Their afternoon breaks took the shape of ritual. If Mary Lee had to wait for a table to pay the check before she could finish her lunch shift, she bitterly resented every minute of lost time. With no one to care what they did to the walls of their room, Jules had nailed up a couple of cheap bedspreads to hide the wallpaper. It was so hot they shed their uniforms and lay on their beds in T-shirts and underwear, reading and drinking iced coffee and listening to music on the stereo Jules had packed into her car, Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain, Bill Evans, Ella Fitzgerald singing April in Paris. Mary Lee was working her way through all of Faulkner. Jules was reading Borges, squinting as smoke from her cigarette curled around her face. Now and then they would read a paragraph or two out loud to one another, erotic pleasure that ruffled the stillness of afternoon heat. For those four hours every day their lives were nothing but fallow indulgence.

Then they started to hang out with the band. Four guys living in an RV at the campground, and they came in just before they were slated to play, ordering as much free food as they could eat, as desperate as Jules and Mary Lee to stretch their income from this gig. Jules and Mary Lee hovered at their table to talk. Jules said, One, they'll have weed. Two, maybe they'll mistake us for groupies.

The drummer stayed at the table when the girls went outside with Colin, Bert, and Joey to smoke a joint in the woods that edged the parking lot. The three of them were in their early twenties, inclined to talk about getting high when they were getting high and to speak to one another in phrases that stalled out before they could become sentences. When they talked about music in their hesitant way, Bert and Joey deferred to Colin, the lead singer. Their shirt collars always curled under and their jeans looked soiled, and Mary Lee tried not to blame them—they had to cart laundry to the single washer and dryer at the lodge, and first accumulate the correct change—but she could never have singled out one of them the way Jules did Colin.

They came back inside to find Owen still at the table, a shot glass engulfed by his long, broad-tipped fingers. He was older than the others, his face taut and creased, so tall he had to slouch in his chair to keep his knees from banging the table. He claimed he was the only black man within a radius of ten miles. What am I doing here? he said. I can't walk through the campgrounds alone at night.

At first he didn't say much to Jules or Mary Lee. He watched them and smiled knowingly. Two little college girls. Two smart little college girls. You about as rare out here as I am.

When Owen decided to talk to them, he argued with Mary Lee about Frantz Fanon—first he had to praise her for knowing who Fanon was—and sighed over Jules's taste in music. Miles, he said, had his moments, but he'd taken jazz in a shabby direction. Owen would loan her a few records, Sidney Bechet and, yeah, Ornette Coleman; Jules would have to learn to like him if she had any self-respect. And you're the expert on that? Jules said, and Owen grinned as if she'd given in: You'll figure that out for yourself, won't you. The other guys would tease Owen (rave on!) and then peter off into silence when he harangued Mary Lee and Jules about what his bandmates were too dumb to register, standing there with their mouths open waiting for the one drop that might fall, trickle-down economics my ass, and the flow of his talk was studded with compliments—don't need to tell that to a smart girl like you. He touched Mary Lee when he talked to her, flirtatious taps on the wrist or the shoulder, and once he fingered the pinned-up hem of her dress and promised to loan her a needle and thread while his warm hand lingered on her thigh.

When the bartender came over to the table to tell Jules and Mary Lee to wait on their customers, as he eventually always had to do, Owen laughed and told them they'd better step smart now.

At night in their room, with a small fan to stir the air and drown out the buzz of the mosquitoes, Jules and Mary Lee reconnoitered like guerrillas bent on harassing an army hampered by its size and its presumption of advantage. Jules curled up on Mary Lee's bed to retail her first sexual encounter with Colin: on a blanket in the woods he had pawed her like a dog digging in dirt. Which made Jules think of the wrong thing, that the band was aptly named, and what was Owen doing cycling through places like this with the Dharma Dogs?

You'll figure that out for yourself, won't you, Mary Lee said.

Jules made a face. I can't even tell if Colin's too dumb to know better or if he was just trying to get off easy.

Don't let that happen.

Jules pulled Mary Lee's arm over her shoulder. I didn't want to spoil it for him by giving instructions.

Aw, shit, that was so female. Aw, shit, it was like coming to rest to end up here again, mired in some squishy substrata of feelings. Too tempting. Until last spring Mary Lee had only nursed unrequited crushes on boys more beautiful, more something than she was. Jules had said, just go get one, and hunkered down inside that borrowed luck, Mary Lee managed to wheedle a drunken boy into bed, to crow over it with Jules afterward. How was that possible, to be pleased she'd bagged him and then, when Monty didn't call her again, to suffer in the same way as before? But Jules was there to listen and console.

A few days after he'd inspected the hem of her uniform, Owen knocked at the door of their room where no one ever came. Jules had gone to the pool to use the gritty communal shower, but Mary Lee preferred to stay in and read when she got off at two. She had shed her uniform, pulled the shoulder pads from her bra and set them on the windowsill to dry in the hot air. Before answering the door, she wriggled into a T-shirt and shorts.

Owen looked around the room. Damn. They keep you worse than they do us.

He had come to sew her dress. Though his cookie tin made a makeshift sewing kit, its contents were arranged in gorgeous order, spools arrayed on the perimeter, tight rolls of basting ribbon and measuring tape wedged in among them, a velvety pincushion at the center, punctured by an array of needles and blue-tipped pins. He even had sewing scissors sheathed in a red leather case.

He sat cross-legged on her bed to sew the dress and had her sit beside him so he could teach her a thing or two. How to knot a thread by looping it around a finger and tugging. How to avoid puckering fabric when you took a stitch. He stitched meticulous tiny x's of thread, evenly spaced, looping the needle in the air with rhythmic accuracy. Drumming, he used the fulcrum of his wrist in the same way, and even when speed blurred his hands he seemed rooted in