Long Story: One Hundred Thousand Omelets and a Single Cactus Blossom

Danielle Orner
Story # 13
May 1, 2007
One Hundred Thousand Omelets and a Single Cactus Blossom
The moment she awoke, she already knew he was gone. She lay there with her eyes closed listening to the chimes tinkling and flailing madly in the wind outside. She imagined the slender metal tubes trying to jerk free of the thin fishing line that attached them to the retractable porch awning and flying glinting into the starless black night. The wind battered the cardboard-thin walls of the trailer as if trying to make a hole for the darkness to seep into her bedroom. The press of the vast night made her feel very small.
With her eyes still closed and her pale face illuminated by the greenish glow of the boxy message, 3:00AM, spilling over the edge of her nightstand, she ran a hand across the empty expanse of mattress next to her. The bed that had felt cramped all those many nights they slept together, tangled and sweaty, in a constant battle of limbs and sheet corners, now felt like a cold never-ending tundra stretching always beyond her fingertips. She let her hand pace back and fourth so that the lines of her palm could take in the memory of the creases in the slept-in sheets. The rhythm of her arm moving up and down over the length of the indent beside her reminded her of an image she had conjured up years ago in her high school religion class. It was an image of seductive red blossoms opening their perfumed chambers to a moist summer night while a gentle breeze rustled orange gauze curtains. The layers of curtains folded back to reveal an Indian woman on a luxurious mat buried among satin pillows. The ocean of her black hair waved about the soft island of her coffee-skinned face. The woman awoke to find herself alone.
Mr. Aggerman would be please to know that a student had remember anything from his class, even if it was only an image invented to match a single line in his lecture on Siddhartha’s life. She wondered what had become of the small, balding man who had taught religion without giving preference to Mormonism, which was his personal practice, and who had wept in front of the class when telling the story of burying his still-born seventh son. Mr. Aggerman probably didn’t remember the quiet teenage girl with mousy brown curls surrounding her vaguely pleasant face who dreamed up India in the back of his class. Ellen was one of those people that almost everyone fails to register in their minds because she has hardly any unusual features. Her face was that of an archetypal prairie girl’s; light skin with an almost perpetually sun-burned nose, freckles, flushed cheeks, and dark honest eyes. Hers was an ordinary prettiness that got less attention than even the smallest of blemishes on her classmates. When she dropped out of school halfway through the first semester of her sophomore year to help support her ailing father and over-worked mother, only the attendance woman in the front office took note.
Ellen spent the rest of the early morning with her arm bridging the void next to her. Drifting in and out of shallow sleep, her mind mixed strange combinations of exotic landscapes with dull grey high school classrooms. A wooden desk sat in the middle of an overgrown jungle and papayas grew out of a black board. Through this hybrid world, Mr. Aggerman and the Indian woman wandered trying to find each other.
* * * * * *
Robert began to cry in the other room. Ellen opened her eyes to find lemon yellow sunshine filling her bedroom with hot persistence. Last night’s wind had gone and the chimes were silent outside. His side of the bed was still empty but it was empty every morning. Ellen clung to a tiny hope for normalcy as she pulled on her ratty pink bathrobe and strained her ears for the sound of water running in the bathroom. Robert’s wails reached a higher pitch and Ellen could visualize his squinty red baby face contorted in rage before she even looked over the side of his crib. Lifting his tense, onesie-clad body out of the crib, Ellen smoothed back his mass of sweaty black hair and whispered to him through kisses on his forehead. “There, there little Robby boy, Mommy’s here.” She kissed him until his grumpy old man face relaxed. Holding him with one arm, she yanked down the collar of her robe and singled-handedly unbuttoned her pajama shirt with the other. She hoisted Robert to her exposed breast and walked through the tight hallway to the kitchen. Robert’s miniature kitten-mouth immediately latched on to Ellen and his eyes half closed as his body went contently limp. Only his little fists continued lazily flexing as he nursed.
In the kitchen, Anna sat at the table already dressed for school. She was organizing the smelly markers in her purple plastic pencil box with an intensity of concentration that was frightening in a seven-year-old. On the other side of the table from Ellen’s busy daughter, there was a folded piece of lined paper with a familiar scrawl of handwriting across the top indicating it was for Ellen and the kids. With the certainty she had felt in the early morning hours, Ellen knew he was gone. She snatched the note off the table, crumpled it, and threw it in the kitchen trash can. Anna looked up from her work and watched her mother. Their identical brown eyes meet and, for a moment, they stared at each other.
“You’re up awful early this morning sugar. What do you want for breakfast?” Ellen broke the connection as she reached over to the laundry basket sitting in a kitchen chair and riffled around for a spit-up rag.
“Robby always wakes me up with his whining and I’ll have an omelet with cheese please.” Anna went back to her marker arranging and spoke her concise order to the table top.
“You want coffee with that.” Ellen shifted Robert to her shoulder and began patting his back.
“No Mom. Coffee is for grown ups.”
“Oh, I see. Is orange juice okay?”
“Yes please.” Anna took a cap off the red marker and gave it a test sniff. Ellen took the two steps into the living room and laid Robert down on a blanket. She moved his baby gym over him and immediately his wrinkly face spasmed in delight and his brilliant blue eyes swelled with wonder. His arms twirled in a kind of carpet backstroke and then he snatched the mirror with a rattle inside. Ellen watched him shake the toy with fervor as if he had never encountered it in his short life. She smiled at his wiggles before walking to the stove. It amazed her how different her children were from the very start of their lives. Pulling out a frying pan, eggs, cheese, cooking spray, and the grater, Ellen started cooking. She stared out the small kitchen window over the sink as she worked. The land was all dirt and weeds except for one giant tree. The land looked exactly the same as on the first day that they had bought it, dreaming of building a real house and growing a lush lawn to cover the half-acre, eight years ago. In the half-naked branches of the tree, clusters of yellow blossoms clung. The ground was also littered with the little dried yellow flowers that the last-night’s wind had ripped from the tree. They blew across the yard and got stuck in the deep tracks left in the dirt by his truck.
Ellen cracked two eggs on the side of the pan and tossed the shells in the trash can. The transparent gel leaking from the empty shells seeped into the lined paper and smeared the ink.
“Momma, where is Daddy?” Anna’s voice was addressed to Ellen’s back as she leaned over the omelet simmering in the oily pan. Ellen let the question linger between them while she scraped the cheesy eggs from the pan with a plastic spatula.
“He’s gone, honey.” Ellen flopped the omelet on a plate to cool.
“For forever?” Anna finished organizing the markers and slipped the carefully closed pencil holder into her Disney princesses backpack.
“Yeah, for forever, sweetie.” Ellen placed the omelet in front of Anna and watched her pick up her fork and take the first bites. The cheese stretched from Anna’s lip all the way down to the plate making Ellen smile. “Now watch your little brother while I go get ready for work.”
* * * * * *
After dropping Anna off at Henry Happer Elementary School, Ellen drove with Robert in his car seat to her mother’s house. Watching the old fashion shops on main street roll by her windshield, Ellen thought of the first time she had seen her husband. She had been seventeen and was working her job at Allen’s Diner, the same job she has had for nine years. She had liked the job then. As the regular costumers came and went, she would use her power not to be noticed to stand close by and listen in on their conversations. With a hot pot of decaf cooling in her hands, she imagined where they went after they slid out of the sticky red plastic booths. She saw them at their dinner tables eating undercooked green beans and playing out the dramas of being a family in the circle of amber dinning room light. As she watched their laugh lines crease, she saw them swinging children on a backyard rubber tire hanging from a tree house. When she witnessed hands touch across the table, she saw them making love in big brass beds with the windows thrown open and curtains blowing in the breeze.
Three ancient fishing buddies came in every Saturday at 4:30AM to grab a coffee before heading to the river. As they spoke, she went with them out into the day and onto a rickety wooden boat named Sweet Lady tipping in the sun-soaked water. They would sit silently staring into the ripples and she would wear a red fisherman’s hat like the one the bearded man wore.
Before she first saw the man who would become her husband, her favorite patrons were two elderly bums who wandered in once or twice a month. She never saw them anywhere else but the diner. They were never in the street or sleeping in the park. They were like apparitions appearing from no where to buy slices of key lime pie with wadded dollar bills and lose change. They never spoke to one another but instead brought in huge stacks of newspaper. They sat for hours, smelling of unwashed skin and urine, reading every single article in their stack. They brought pens and circled different titles, pictures, sentences, and paragraphs. Ellen lingered over their shoulders and watched, unnoticed, as they circled bits of a travel feature on Fiji or lines from a review on a New York art opening. On those afternoons, she and her two well-read bums would snorkel in perfect blue water populated by impossibly colored fish and then enjoy an opera from their own red velvet box.
And then there was Adam. He had come from an even smaller town in order to attend classes at the city junior college. Both his father and mother had died in a car accident and left him with just enough money to move into a house with five other house mates, pay tuition, and feed himself on a steady diet of canned soup and beef jerky. He went to the diner for lunch as a treat on Tuesdays and Thursdays between his writing composition and computer skills classes. He had intense blue eyes and a hint of a scruffy beard growing sparsely along his jaw line. When he came to the diner, Ellen wasn’t the only one who listened in on his talk. Other patrons had a habit of arriving for lunch at the same time so that they could have discussions with Adam, who mainly liked to speak on religion and literature. The more timid costumers would simple choose booths close to his so that they could listen without being challenged. His views were nothing like what the community had heard at either the Methodist or the Lutheran church. He claimed that women should be allowed to be pastors because they were the first to speak the gospel as they ran, still clutching burial incense, bare footed from the empty tomb. Mixing eastern and western religious traditions, he described the little fragment of God residing in every human breast. He could become passionate in his arguments and occasionally shouted causing the timid costumers to sink more safely into their separate booth while the patron who dared to enter a conversation with Adam turned red with embarrassment. Adam was always so sure of what he was saying and illustrated his views with precision.
Ellen stood in her pink uniform skirt and blouse trimmed with brown and held platters of club sandwiches and omelets while being transported on the waves of Adam’s voice. He had a way of describing things to where Ellen didn’t have to wonder if she were inventing thoughts or lives for him as she did with the other customers. As he spoke, she was sure that they went to the same places: to olive tree groves where shepards slept, to mystic caves where oracles whispered through scented smoke, and to hidden moments tucked between verses.
Like with the other costumers, Ellen never spoke more to Adam then the ordinary diner chatter expected from a waitress. They may never have begun a relationship if it hadn’t been for the untrustworthy latch attached haphazardly to the door of the one-room unisex diner bathroom.
Ellen had gone back to the bathroom after a particularly busy lunch hour to rest her blistered feet and put a wet paper towel on the back of her neck. A woman, who she had never seen in the diner before and who had to be just passing through town on some trip, had yelled at her for standing in the corner and staring into space instead of refilling her coffee cup. After that moment, the woman was completely unhappy with the service at the diner and made loud angry complaints whenever Ellen got anywhere near her table. The woman had a fierce bob of perfectly linear grey hair and an overly made-up tired face. She was dressed in a crisp black skirt suit complete with tasteful black nylons, black pumps, and an elegant black sun hat. Small black pearls studded her ears and lined her neck. Ellen tried to forgive her rude comments and abuse because the woman was dressed as if she was on her way to the funeral. Yet, when the woman stalked out of the restaurant without leaving even lose change for a tip, Ellen had to sneak a break in the dingy unisex restroom.
She had just placed the wet paper towel on her neck and folded her small hands in her pink lap when the door swung open. The rusty old latch slipped as if it had never been locked and Adam stood in the doorway surprised to see the mousy young waitress sitting on the closed toilet set. She glanced up, too exhausted to be embarrassed, and found Adam’s intensely blue eyes studying her as if discovering for the first time some fascinating detail in a familiar sight. He looked like a person who has suddenly noticed a delicate dandelion growing at the edge of a driveway. In a moment that called for embarrassed fumbling, muttered apologies, and swift door shutting, the two contemplated each other. Ellen studied Adam’s face from this new angle. She was so used to seeing only his profile as he sat talking in a booth that she was surprised by his boyish frank appearance. She had never realized that he was so close to her in age.
As she watched him, Adam smiled a humble crooked smile like that of a young boy who has been caught by a doting grandmother with his shirt covered in fresh baked cookie crumbs. It was a smile that teasingly asked for forgiveness without displaying any regret. Ellen caught his contagious grin and returned it. Adam backed out of the doorway and carefully closed the door. Ellen slid the damp cloth from her neck and let it fall into the trash can. She stood and examined her face in the smudge, cracked mirror over the sink. “Hello” she whispered to the mirror and tried on her new smile. When she walked back into the diner, Adam had already left.
* * * * * *
Robert began banging his octopus teething ring against his car seat strap as Ellen turned onto her mother’s driveway. The two-story house she had grown up in sagged and curling paint flaked off the shutters. The grass had reached the height at which it had begun to grow its natural blossoms and looked more like dry prairie brush than a suburban lawn. Hoisting squirming Robert from his set, Ellen hauled his diaper bag onto her free shoulder and trekked through the grass to the front door. Before she even knocked on the faded blue door, she could hear the squealing children on the other side. Her mother had run an in-home daycare ever since her father had his second stroke. Her mother swore that it was the hot summer sun out at the construction sites that had done it to him. Ellen knew that her mother would be able to read Adam’s departure on her face so she took a breath before turning the knob.
Her mother, a slim woman with salt and pepper hair and cat-eye glasses, was kneeling on the living room carpet with four children and a pile of primary colored blocks. Three other kids leapt about the room in a chase game and Ellen could hear more chatter coming from the kitchen where the children were allowed to draw or do play dough at the table.
“Hey Mom, I brought your grandson to see you.” Ellen let Robert slide down her leg to the carpet. He was already clapping with excitement.
“Hey there Ellie. And how is my favorite little stinker? Oh, Ellen what’s wrong? Oh no, he left didn’t he. Oh God baby, he finally just went, didn’t he?” Carol ushered Robert, whose newly learned crawl was jerky and slow, over toward the blocks and stood up to study her daughter’s face.
“It’s fine Mom. I knew it was going to happen.” Ellen began unpacking Robert’s diaper bag on the sofa.
“Do you need to talk baby? You know you can call in sick today and we can talk. I know how much you love being with the kids. You were always so good with all of them. We can make a day of it. All of us. We will get ice cream and go to the park and …” Carol opened her arms to gesture to all the kids playing in every corner of the house.
“It’s fine Mom. I just want to talk to Dad real quick and then I am off to work. I am already all dressed anyway.” Ellen smoothed her pink skirt.
“Oh honey, you are always helping everyone and not thinking of yourself. That’s your problem.” Carol began but thought better of finishing. “Well, if you insist, your Dad’s in the back bedroom. Have a good day at work and try not to be hard on yourself.” Ellen headed for the back bedroom before her mother could start again. The look of concern wrinkling her thin mother’s face told her all the things her mother was longing to say.
In the dim bedroom, her father sat in a wheelchair staring out the window through the half-closed blinds. The static TV flickered with an infomercial. The volume was so low that Ellen could barely hear the murmured message. She pulled a chair close to her Dad being careful not to disturb the tubes and machines humming and glowing around him.
“Hey Daddy.” Ellen stroked a sweaty strand of hair off of his forehead in a gesture that reminded her of how she touched her children when they slept and adjusted his plaid bathrobe. Her father’s flesh hung on his frame as a memory of obesity and his grey eyes where misty. His jaw was slack and his lips chapped. He hadn’t spoken in five years and hadn’t walked in ten. The doctors kept saying it was only a matter of time now and didn’t bother trying new treatments. Ellen still gave her mother half her paycheck to keep him there and came over on Sundays to heal bath him so they wouldn’t have to hire a weekend nurse. The thought of his limp body covered in suds made her lip tremble. “He left Daddy. He left in the middle of the night while we were all sleeping. He left when he didn’t have to see our faces.” Ellen choked and let her face fall into her hands. “God damn it. God damn it. God damn it. I can’t even hate him for it. Shouldn’t I at least be able to hate him for it? Shouldn’t I Daddy? Shouldn’t I?” She felt herself losing control and becoming repetitive. She wanted to chant it over and over until it lost its power. “He didn’t have to see our faces, our faces, our faces, all lined up in the driveway and watching him pull away. God damn it.” But it was almost ten o’clock so she sucked in her words and wiped her face and kissed her father’s unmoving cheek.
* * * * * *
The Tuesday after the bathroom moment was rainy. Most of the regular lunchtime costumers stayed at home listening to their radio serials instead of braving the rain. The diner was nearly empty. Adam was there reading a novel over his plate of eggs. Ellen slid into the booth across from him and watched the drops streak down the window until he put his book down.
“Um. I’m Ellen.” She stuck her hand out awkwardly over the table in a more formal gesture than she intended.
“I know. It says so on your little gold name tag.” Adam didn’t look up. Ellen put her hand over her name tag as if to confirm its existence. Adam grinned at her nervous gesture. “I’m Adam, sorry I can be a bit of a prick sometimes.”
“I know I listen in on your conversations. I mean I know your name not that you’re a prick. I, oh never mind.” Adam laughed and slid his book into his bag. The rain pounded the windows and they talked. Adam told Ellen about his desire to convey God’s true nature through art and Ellen told Adam about watching costumers. The bell on the door tinkled as costumers came and went slopping water on the linoleum. Their umbrellas dripped by the door. Their places were set and cleared. Omelets and pancakes bubbled in the kitchen and waitresses carried coffee back and forth. Cups were filled and drained. Adam and Ellen fell in love.
* * * * * * *
The diner was busy that morning. Ellen avoided the faces of the costumers and waitresses by constantly carrying trays back and forth. She wondered if her mother had been right and she should have stayed home. She walked to the pizza place three doors down whenever she needed to use the restroom. She wore herself into a stupor by walking that small loop from the kitchen to the tables until her exhaustion overwhelmed her memory. She only remembered again when she pulled into the parking lot of the public library and walked in by habit. Looking into her purse to find this week’s list of titles, she found nothing but crimpled receipts and single sticks of gum that had been separated from their packs. She remembered he was gone and stood staring at the shelves without direction.
* * * * * *
“This one isn’t finished yet but I thought you might like it.” Adam pulled a faded sheet off of a canvas propped up on top of the second-hand dresser in his tiny bedroom. Ellen fidgeted nervously as she waited for him to reveal his art to her. This was the first time she had met Adam outside of the diner and she was worried she might spoil their relationship with the wrong reaction to the art Adam talked so much about. As the sheet came off, Ellen grinned to see a friendly-looking Jesus, complete with white robe and hippy hair, sitting in a diner booth and enjoying omelets with her two bums. “It’s inspired by you actually.”
* * * * * *
Anna was conceived accidentally on a worn quilt in the flatbed of Adam’s ancient blue pick-up truck. Adam’s breath was warmer than the summer night and the country road was deserted. The sky was bright with stars that couldn’t predict the future.
When they discovered Anna’s presence in the watery world of Ellen’s womb, Adam went out to find a ring at a pawn shop and to withdraw from the junior college, which didn’t bother Ellen much because she had found his report card crumpled in a pocket of a jean jacket he had left draped on the back of her parent’s sofa. He had been failing almost everything. The professor’s didn’t value his passion for talk and art over his inability to pass tests. Adam got Ellen’s father’s old job with Smith and Sons Construction Company and justified his abandonment of his artistic religious calling with the consolation that Jesus was born a carpenter.
They were married at the Lutheran Church and had a reception with pink Kool-Aid punch and store-bought sugar cookies in the basement. Ellen’s father couldn’t attend the reception because they couldn’t manage to get his wheelchair down the narrow stairwell. After the celebration, Ellen and Adam bought the trailer on a half-acre of land with the remainder of Adam’s inheritance and with a loan co-signed by Carol, whose only collateral was Ellen’s aging childhood home. And there they anticipated the birth of Anna.
Adam was disappointed by the wet bawling creature Anna turned out to be. He had expected a messenger from the divine origins who would still be alight with a purity of soul. When he looked into her eyes, he didn’t see a knowledge of God but only a reflection of his wife’s plain brown irises. Before her birth, he had given Ellen a list of books to check out from library every week on her way home from the diner. He had planned to educate his daughter in the grand traditions of art, philosophy, and literature. She was going to be what he had failed to be. Every night before the birth, Adam would predict Anna’s future in passionate monologues preformed over the lukewarm TV dinners that he and Ellen ate on a card table with torn fabric that they had purchased at yard sale to serve as their dining room table. The table was squeezed into the cramped kitchen because they had no dining room. On one such night, Adam leapt up from his folding chair and came around the table to where Ellen sat with her swollen feet in a plastic bowl filled with sudsy warm water and her swollen belly propped up against the edge of the card table. He smoothed the sweaty tangles of brown hair off her forehead with a callused hand rubbed raw by boards and tool handles and, with his equally rough other hand, traced the curves of her belly feeling for the kicks of little limbs. Adam leaned so close to whisper in her ear that she could feel the bristles of his now full beard and smell the familiarity of his breath. “This is what it is all about, Ellen. All of it, books and stories and philosophies and God and history, is about this: two ordinary people struggling to live and love and create. Anna is our art, you know that. She is our own little piece of human artwork. You know what is best about this kind of artwork? Do you know what’s best about it, Ellen?”
“No. What’s best about it, Adam?” Ellen leaned her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes. In the reddish darkness behind her lids, she tried to visualize Anna in her body. A transparent glowing white figure floated across the screens of her lids. An unintended smile drifted across her lips and she became absorbed in the feeling of Adam’s hand pacing over the curves of her belly. Anna was there, she knew, on the other side of the touch absorbed in the feeling of her father.
“The best thing about it is that this sort of art won’t become stagnant or dusty. We won’t have to worry about it being lost in some museum attic or about its color fading or paint eroding. Anna will be art that grows and lives and breaths. Art forever changing. Art forever the testament of God’s wonders. What could be a greater creation?” Adam’s eyes glazed over as he stared beyond the peeling yellow wallpaper barely holding on above the kitchen sink.
“Nothing I suppose. Nothing could be greater.” Ellen nuzzled her nose into her husband’s beard and drifted into her own dreams of sunlit family picnics. In her daydreams, a boy and a girl ran in tall grass before leaping onto a smiling Carol’s lap. They rolled across the old quilt and her father was there to catch them on the other side. He was free of a wheelchair and told stories in a husky voice to the doe-eyed children as they snuggled into his plaid shirt that smelled of fresh wood shavings.
The next morning, Ellen found Adam packing up all his canvases, sculptures, and art supplies that had been stashed in the second bedroom of the trailer. He was sweaty with the effort of dragging all his work to the center of the room. “Adam, honey, what are you doing?” She leaned against the door frame wearing nothing but his t-shirt and a pair of lavender underwear. The bottom of her belly stuck out of the t-shirt. With her matted curls wildly framing her simple face, she looked like a modern-day blue-collar Madonna.
“We have got to make room in The Studio for our latest collaboration.” He beamed up from his place kneeling on the floor before his pile of artwork. “This is the baby’s room now.” He added with a laugh in response to her look of confusion. He continued speaking plans to himself while packing up the room and Ellen went to the kitchen to make breakfast.
Adam left that afternoon with his pick-up bed filled with easels, brushes, canvas, and frames. A huge sculpted crucifix stuck out the back and Jesus’ face with a barbed wire crown puncturing his clay forehead gazed mournfully into the cloudless sky. The bums from the diner painting peered over their newspapers at her while they traveled down the dirt road. Adam return later with only a beat-up old crib in the bed of his truck. Ellen didn’t ask where the art had gone.
* * * * * *
After Anna was born, Adam discovered that he had little talent as a teacher. As Anna grew and proved to have less talent as a student than Adam expected, the list of library requests featured fewer and fewer books for Anna and more for himself. He arrived home from work aching and sun-burned lacking the old enthusiasm for Jesus’ family business. Over his TV dinner, he read his books instead of speaking. A silence settled around him as perpetual as the wood dust in his black hair. He left the tasks of feeding, cuddling, and bathing the child to Ellen who seemed to have a natural affinity for communication through touch.
Anna frustrated him with her already formed personality and disposition. He had imagined that she would be as malleable as wet clay with a mind as blank as a canvas waiting to be filled with colors. Although she showed no knowledge of the place from which she came, she did seem to be a miniature human being who arrived already knowing she hated baths and loved arranging toys by her own toddler organizational system. She finger-painted careful so as not to smear a single smudge on her child-size smock or the table or her delicate wrists. Adam observed this serious little person making straight lines across her page instead of painting flowers and stick figures like he would a stranger. He seemed to be trying to figure out what she had to do with him.
As Anna grew, Ellen watched Adam dwindle. He never complained about the small trailer or his dead-end, manual labor job or the screaming toddler or the endless march of frozen entrees or Ellen’s thickening middle. Unaware of his surroundings, he just seemed to be receding becoming more and more of a mirage in the house whose existence was only made real by a trial of dirty dishes neatly stacked in the sink, of white t-shirts stained yellow on the underarms, and muddy overalls spilling from a laundry basket.
On rare nights, Adam would gently shake Ellen awake and suddenly be his old self in that nighttime bedroom made into another world by the pale moon glow. He would speak again of God’s beauty and of capturing a small corner of that essence in art. He whispered his ideas into her ears and kissed them into her skin. He spoke of the desert, of its perceived bareness and its hidden beauty. His whispers took her to red rocked canyons and to cacti studded cliffs where a Jesus figure wandered in white robes being tempted. “The desert is like our lives: harsh and unforgiving but speckled with unconquerable life. God is the cactus flower blooming as red as the flaming sunset.” Adam stroked the words into her hair and left them tangled there. Then they would be eighteen again on the thread-bare patches of a quilt laid out in the bed of a pick-up. In the light of those early mornings, hope would dry out its wings in Ellen’s chest but by the evenings Adam was hauling his defeated body through the screen door and into the same old routine.
Ellen didn’t tell anyone but her invalid father about Adam’s withdrawal from the physical world. What could she say to the other waitresses in the diner whose husbands and boyfriends plowed through packs of Bud Lites or spent afternoons in other women’s beds or burned cigarette butt scars into their children’s wrists or gave out black eyes as anniversary gifts? Or to her mother whose husband had suffered two strokes before lingering on as a semi-vegetable and costing a fortune to maintain as a body without a spirit? So she spoke only to her father who was an expert on both being there and being gone.
Adam drank black coffee for breakfast, washed his face in the bathroom sink, loaded his pick-up with tools, rumbled out of the dirt driveway, built homes not his own in burning sun and freezing wind, came home dirty, stiffly kissed his wife and child’s cheeks, sat at the card table with a tattered book and a microwaved dinner, showered, and crawled between the sheets. Ellen made breakfast for Anna, cleaned and dressed her, braided her hair, dressed herself in the diner uniform, dropped Anna off at her mother’s, cried to her father, listened at the diner, took Adam’s list to the library, picked up Anna, microwaved dinners, played with Anna on the carpet, watched Adam eat, put Anna to bed, cleaned the trailer, sat at the card table staring out the kitchen window, and slid into bed next to sleeping Adam. This routine repeated itself until the bump that was Robert swelled to an unbearable size and Ellen discovered the sculptures lined up behind the trailer.
* * * * * * *
Ellen stared at the shelves in the library. There seemed to be so many more looming there then there had ever been before. She saw a familiar librarian approaching her to ask if she need any help locating a book and she began to panic. She didn’t want to shrink down to a weeping huddled mass on the carpet of the public library and she suddenly felt sure that she would be if the librarian asked her what she needed. Darting into the nearest aisle, she pretended to study the book bindings. As the librarian passed, Ellen read the titles slowly to herself like a calming chant. Her hand came up to touch the binding of a book whose title snagged her mind. It shocked her to find the book off the shelf and in her hand. She had never selected one herself. Before she dropped out of school, she had read as much of the assigned books as possible over the din of her mother’s at-home daycare before giving in to the noise and settling in the living room with the children climbing on her like a human jungle gym. But here was a book in her hand. She read the title again The Unbearable Lightness of Being. She took it to the check out counter, nodded when the librarian asks “just this one today?”, and left to collect Anna from school and Robert from daycare.
Anna was the last child left on the playground when Ellen pulled up. The chains of empty swings creaked in the wind and the slide loomed dark silhouetted against the backdrop of the setting sun. All the other after-care children had gone home already. Anna stood on the blacktop with her back-pack on her back and her eyes scanning the road beyond the chain-link fence. A yard duty sat lounging in a beach chair and flipping through a magazine not paying any attention to the girl with the late mother. “I am sorry, Anna, for not coming on time.” Ellen knelt on the blacktop and wrapped her arms around her serious daughter who had not cried.
“It is alright, Mom. I knew you would come.”
* * * * * * *
Two weeks before Robert’s due date, Ellen was sent home from the diner to rest. The day was hot and Ellen vomited in the dirt as soon as she stepped out of her car in the front yard. When she was done spitting the taste from her mouth, she walked behind the empty trailer to where an unused garden hose was coiled. There, lined up against the back wall of the trailer, were seven crosses with metal blossoms sprouting from there centers. They were made from rough material that Ellen recognized at once as scraps of wood, chunks of concrete, swathes of fiber glass, and twisted bits of metal. Adam must have scrounged the materials from various construction sights. All lined up the crosses simultaneously reminded Ellen of a little graveyard and of a trim flowerbed. She sunk to the ground in front of the crosses and her gigantic belly rested in the dirt. Gingerly, she touched the blossoms. A ragged edge of a metal petal sliced the pad of her index finger and a drop scarlet blood pooled in the dust. As she watched the red seep into the earth, Ellen knew. She lay down in the dirt curling around her unborn son and spent the afternoon watering the site that marked the death of their collaboration and the rebirth of Adam’s solo career.
* * * * * * *
Ellen fell asleep on the couch with her library book spread open on her lap. When the next morning’s sun washed over the trailer, Anna found her there. She watched her sleeping mother with her solemn brown eyes. In the next room, Robert squinted his whole face as light trickled into his baby dreams. The note smeared with egg dried in the trash can. The tree let lose it last yellow blossoms to swirl gracefully before falling to the dry dirt. The cook at the diner sprayed down the frying pans to make the morning’s first omelets. Carol opened bright yellow cans of play dough and dumped the multi-colored blobs onto the kitchen table. Ellen’s father’s chest rose and fell one last time in the back bedroom before becoming completely still. And a blue pick-up truck sped down a black stretch of highway with a red cactus blossom fluttering on the dashboard.