52 Stories

story by kpbstevens

Oracle

She seemed to meditate over her words before she spoke them.  They emerged sonorously, the most mundane words freighted with meaning.  “I’d like the duck l’orange,” she would say, and he would hear the deep places of aviary and Gallic history resounding beneath them.

He was never entirely convinced that he knew her.  She seemed so simple.  She wore too much make-up and the preset buttons on her car radio were set to music that he couldn’t stand.  But he had told her, on their first date, about how he and his sister had cowered beneath the dining room table as their father chastised their mother, screaming at her about streaks on the mirrors and shirts that were hung up in the wrong order.  Why had he told her?  Because she kept receiving calls from her sister on her pink cellphone.  Complaints about the evening’s schedule, that had been disrupted by the sister’s ex-husband’s failure to pick up the kids on time.  “Mindy,” she had finally said - slowly, solemnly - “I’m busy.  I’ll call and talk about it later.”  And when he’d told her about his parent’s divorce, she’d said, “you hid under the table,” and the additive power of her voice returned him to the dark geometrical pattern of chair legs, and his sister leaning her head on a red and gold seat cushion and the scent of pine cleaner.

Did he love her?  If he had seen her on the subway or passed her on the street, he would have thought that she was trashy.  Not his kind of woman at all.  But it was possible that he loved her.  They were in a wine bar on 51st Street, being jostled by men with thick African accents.  “I guess they’re from the United Nations,” he said.  “The United Nations,” she agreed, and he felt the rising spume of history, the reverberations of Kruschev’s shoe on the table and…and…but he didn’t really know very much about the United Nations.  And that was just the thing.  The way she spoke made him want to know, to investigate the foundations of thought and history that lay beneath mere language.  There was a report in the Times about the failures of the public school system, and when she said “public school system,” he saw them, all those under-served inner-city kids.  It was as if they were turning their faces up to his overarching gaze.

 His sister Esther was amazed by her.  She came for visit just when he had first realized that this was a woman he might want to marry.  He could tell that Esther was repulsed by her jaguar-print purse and her french nails.  “Esther’s been living in Korea,” he told her, and she said, “living in Korea,” and he felt the cold clay sides of the kimchi pot, buried and fermenting in the earth, and tasted the salty-hot pepper flakes on the slabs of cabbage.

“Really, you want to marry her?” Esther asked.  Her thin, already pinched face seemed to grow tighter around her nose.

“I said I’m thinking about it.”

“I wouldn’t have thought that she was your type at all.”

“It’s her voice.  Don’t you think she has a terrific voice?”

“Think about it, that’s all.  You would be marrying a lot more than a voice.”

So he took her out to dinner at a small pan-Asian place and told her, “My father always hated everyone.  That was his basic problem.  He always had to be in control of everything my mother did.  It was like he didn’t trust her.  The dishes were put in the dishwasher the wrong way, or the bottles of medicine were in the wrong place in the medicine cabinet.  He was OCD, I guess.  He never hit her or anything, but I guess he was abusive.”  He paused and waited.  Years of therapy had led him to this conclusion, and he wanted to hear her say it, to confirm it with her depth-charged voice.

“That doesn’t sound like much fun,” she said.  He laughed, but then he wondered.  Was that the final analysis of his childhood, the summation of all that terror and anger?  He had been warped for life because it wasn’t much fun?

“There was a boy in my class whose mother shot his father,” he told her.  “His father had gone on a week-long hunting trip without leaving any food in the house.  And when he got back, she took his twelve gauge and shot him.  Brice, that was the name of the boy, he wore his dad’s hunting shirt to school the next day.  The one he was shot in.  With blood and holes in it.”

She frowned over that.  “It doesn’t seem fair.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe he was bringing them food.”

He listened to her slow words and tried to hear the swish of the wind in the trees or the crack of bracken beneath the hunter’s boots.  But his heart rebelled.  There should be no other meanings beneath the meanings he had decided on.

“My father had an order to his shirts,” he said.  And as she ruminated on this and prepared to give it weight and substance, he could hear the click of the hangers as his father checked their order.  He stood up and left the restaurant so that he wouldn’t have to hear her speak.

Tags: /childhood trauma /dating /domestic abuse /fiction /flash fiction /history /relationships /prose