IN HER OWN TIME

Later I would write a short story—my first—that was a hodgepodge of fact and fiction:

It was the end of the school year, and she felt utterly oppressed by her situation at work—a class full of four-turning-five-year-olds, who seemed to become more heedless and willful as the last weeks wore themselves out. One little boy who had been relatively well-behaved at the beginning of the year was now insufferable—would strike out for any offense, however small or unintentional. She looked in her bag of tricks and found it gapingly empty. She didn’t know what to do anymore and was tired of trying. She wrote:

“A rutted road winds down behind the school, and a small bridge carries it over a canal to its end. No one uses the road, for the acres to the right have been leveled, the eventual floor to some construction, and to the left there is only a field of wild mustard flowers, as stridently, dizzily yellow as can be imagined. It was there I took refuge in the middle of one workday last week and ate my lunch in the company of the bugs. I remembered seeing such a field—all yellow—from above, last year, and now I realized that this was the same one. I gazed up at the school on the hill and thought about what it meant to me—the only reason I’ve had for living for a number of blank years. Then I tried to forget. For a brief moment I beheld the flowers at sea, eddying and blowing in the wind, and I wanted to laugh. They appeared loosed from their stems, all flitting their own ways, like a fairy swarm.”

That same morning she took a little girl’s face in her hands and said tiredly, “Sweetheart, I like you very much…I just wish you wouldn’t act so rowdy.”

The child looked back at her plaintively awhile and asked, “Why do you like me?”

And she felt, as she looked into that face, with its pathos and uncertainty, that it was her own reflection that she saw.

She was surprised by the phone call and couldn’t imagine later why she had accepted his invitation. She had told her girlfriend she wasn’t interested in going out with anyone, but her friend had gone ahead and given him her phone number anyway.

He was a pleasant-looking man, as it turned out—hefty, with lightly freckled skin and bushy bleached-out eyebrows. He reminded her of someone…or maybe of several people, she thought. His manner was easy and hearty, and she felt much more comfortable with him than she had expected to.

After buying some exotic cheeses in a specialty shop, they sat in lawn chairs under a willow tree, a flurry of ducks at their feet.

“When I was a little girl,“ she mused, “my father drove me home from school one day and stopped in a shop. He came out with a pink cardboard box, tied with a string. He told me it was a cake and put it in the shade in the back seat of the car…so the frosting wouldn’t melt, he said. He stuck to his cake story even when I insisted I heard peeping sounds coming from the box. He had bought me a duckling, a downy little yellow thing…”

One thing she liked about him, she decided as they drove on towards Bolinas, was his sense of timing. Just when she felt a length of silence pulling taut between them, when she began anxiously casting about in her mind for something worth saying, he would speak up, easily, naturally. She was grateful that he was good at both—quiet and conversation.

They took an army blanket and their bag of food into a scruffy field by an estuary and snacked on crackers and brie and wine. He told her about his recent adventures abroad.

“I hitchhiked across Castilla to the Costa Brava,” he said, “and lived for a while in the hills behind a little fishing village. They were terraced in stone a thousand years ago for growing olive trees—but desolate now. I camped out in an ancient stone shelter—square on the outside, dome-shaped on the inside, like an igloo.” He reconstructed it in the air with his hands. “It had a hole in the roof to let out smoke from the fire. I worried the first night it rained that it would leak…but in the morning I discovered that the cobwebs covering the hole had caught all the raindrops.”

“I’ve never been to Europe,” she said wistfully. “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do.”

They gathered up the blanket and food and walked down to a dilapidated pier.

“Would you like to fish?” he asked.

She shook her head. She didn’t like the idea of catching and killing things, but she didn’t want to say so—she didn’t want him to feel she was criticizing him. As she watched him, bent over his tackle box, she noticed how his sandy hair spiraled from a small bald patch at the top of his head. It lit up in her—that bald spot—a glow of tenderness, small and brief as a match flame. She noticed too how fair his skin was at his lower back where his T-shirt gaped above his jeans. Suddenly, standing out on the blustery end of the pier, she started back as though struck a blow by the wind. Only it wasn’t the wind, she knew. It was fear. For she was feeling a swell of physical longing for this man, and it was the last thing she wanted to feel.

She moved behind a barricade of weathered wood built on one side of the pier. When he stood up and saw her shivering, he started to put an arm around her, with a look of concern, but she turned deftly away, pretending she hadn’t read his intention.

“I think I’ll take a walk down to the beach,” she said. “Maybe collect some rocks…” She made herself smile.

All the rocks she found looked more or less the same—gold-brown and coarse—and she threw down as many as she picked up.

I wish I’d married a childhood sweetheart and lived…any way whatever…ever after, she thought almost bitterly. She couldn’t deal with contemporary courtship, she told herself—the precipitate advances and retreats. He would try to embrace her or kiss her soon, and she would have to let him or explain herself. Either way would feel like a violation—to be touched before she was ready to be touched or to have to explain before she felt ready to explain.

He stood beyond the wind-block at the end of the pier, his baggy T-shirt flapping in the wind. As she approached he turned his palms up to show her he was empty-handed—he hadn’t caught anything.

On the way back to the car, he started up a narrow path at the foot of a low cliff. She shied back, seeing the thickets of poison oak that bordered the path.

“I’d rather not go that way,” she said.

When he looked at her quizzically, she flushed. “Poison oak,” she said lamely. ’’It seems all I have to do is look at it and I break out.”

So they took the road instead.

Driving back to town he told her about his plans. He had been living out of his truck since his return from Spain, but at the end of the month he was moving into a small ranch house in the country outside of Danville. He was going to plant a vegetable garden and build a shop for cabinetmaking.

When they found that the restaurant didn’t open until 5:00, he asked if she would mind if he fished until then. She said no. So he walked down the road to the beach with his fishing pole while she sat in the car, where it was warm, with her notebook and pencil. She tried to write, but couldn’t. She had wanted him to stay with her, she realized. She should have told him so. Only she hadn’t known what she wanted then. In fact, she never seemed to discover what it was that she wanted until it was too late. And feeling unaccountably forlorn, she began to cry. She laid her head down on the seat and wept. After a while she dried her face, itchy from tears, and began to write.

She had the odd sensation that he was being careful with her—or of her—after that. Maybe her nose had been red or her eyes over-bright when he got back to the car, and he guessed that she had been crying.

They sat in a corner of the restaurant, the fronds of hanging plants trailing almost to their shoulders. They talked about their parents.

“My father was extravagant,” she said, shaking her head. “Every year at Christmas he brought home a magnificent tree, so tall he had to lop off the top to stand it upright in the living room. He and I used to decorate it together. One year my mother told me my father would be away for Christmas. And I knew with a child’s logic that because there was no tree there, my father wasn’t coming home…” She paused. “He never did. He left my mother for someone else.”

“My father died two years ago,” he said. “He was in a coma when I went to visit him in the hospital. He lay straining forward in the bed, gasping for breath. With his hair so disheveled and his jaw sunken in, I would never have recognized him—they’d taken out his dentures. It was strange… For the first time in my life, I could feel compassion for him—the compassion I’d feel for a stranger because he looked like a stranger. I never expected to feel anything but relief when he died, though the relief was mostly for my mother’s sake. He was always so hard on her, and she was so…gentle. She couldn’t stand up to him.”

He was looking down at his hands, thick-fingered, strong hands, splayed out on either side of his plate.

“My greatest fear growing up was that I would turn out like him,” he said. “I half-believed that becoming a man meant becoming a brute.”

They continued to talk as they ate, and there was suddenly a moment when she knew who he reminded her of—a lively little freckle-faced boy she’d known in kindergarten. She remembered now that she had invited him over to her house after school one day, showed him every acrobatic trick she knew on her backyard swing set…but the following afternoon he had gone to play with her next-door neighbor, and older girl who had stuck out her tongue over the back fence.

That night as they were driving home, they stopped along a cliff, and she got out despite the cold and stood beside him—a little ways away, looking at the stars. She kept her arms folded, hands tucked inside the opposite cuffs. She was afraid that if she let one hand drop, he would take it. She felt herself becoming overstrained with the effort of maintaining a separateness from him—like the effort it took to hold two magnets close, but apart. Yet the very strength of her attraction made it necessary to resist it. He didn’t make any move towards her, and she thought, with relief, maybe he will give me time, after all.

At her door he said good-bye gently and a little awkwardly, one corner of his mouth pulling into a half-smile. She had the impulse to reach out to him then but stopped herself. There would be another time, she told herself.

That night she dreamed she was a child again. Her father had rigged up a wonderful swing from the great oak branch in the backyard. Instead of merely swinging back and forth, she could swoop around and over the top of the branch, dropping down as smoothly and gracefully as on a ferris wheel ride. A man stood below her—it was supposed to be her father, but it didn’t look like him—and watched protectively, watched and waited while she swung, until the sun set and the stars came out.

The next morning she woke up scratching. She had poison oak on her bottom. At school the children tittered as she gingerly let herself down onto chairs, and she laughed too, half-enjoying the preposterousness of her affliction. By late afternoon, though, she felt her skirt alternately sticking to, then tearing from her skin. The sores were weeping and drying the way they did. The next day she stayed in bed, on her stomach, reading and writing. Silly as it was, she realized that she was glad she could tell him she had come down with poison oak. She was afraid he had thought her skittish—now she felt vindicated.

The week passed, and she didn’t hear from him. Only then did it occur to her that she couldn’t get in touch with him, since he was living out of his truck. She would have to wait until he called her. The fact of his inaccessibility made her suddenly anxious. She waited. The next week she told herself that he would be busy moving, probably too busy to think of anything else. The week after that, she didn’t know what to tell herself. One Friday afternoon she sat by the phone, thinking she would call her girlfriend and ask if she knew where to find him. She sat immobile for a half hour. Then she wrote a poem:

“A mind littered with broken inventions

Hands too tired to touch or tend

Where is…?

Yellow hills in smoky tableau

Look like a backdrop to me

Children fight and tumbling

Crush my rainbow tissue paper

Don’t call me

I’ll call you when…”