“What am I supposed to do?”
He disappears into the bathroom for some tweezers and a cotton ball soaked in alcohol.
The cottage we live in is only one story and a bit run-down. It’s what’s called a carriage house. It’s on someone else’s property. We are caretakers. We mow the lawn, handle the trash, look out for robbers and all that. That’s how we manage to live here, a place crawling with deer and mice and ticks, instead of in an apartment in town. At this hour, from our bedroom, the rest of the house feels dark and dangerous. Things might be creeping, rotting, plotting revenge out there and I wouldn’t even know because I can’t see the living room, and beyond that I can’t see the small kitchen with two windows that look out onto a screen porch that looks out even farther onto the road and the mailboxes. I can’t see any of that right now.
“Have you been rolling around in the grass?” He dabs at the spot and I can smell the astringent. He clamps down with the tweezers. “Ready?” He yanks once, taking a bit of skin with it. “That ought to do it.” He applies the alcohol.
I don’t know if he pulled the head out. His mouth is twisted, worried.
“Is it gone?”
“Yeah. You’re fine.”
“Sure?”
“I’ll look again in the morning.”
“What if the morning is too late?”
“You’re fine.” He takes the tweezers and whatever he’s tweezed back to the bathroom. I hear the toilet flush and see him walk through the living room. He has on a pair of boxers and a ribbed undershirt. When we were teenagers my husband worked in Akron’s rubber plants. Now most of those plants are gone and he found a job running the heavy machinery for, oddly enough, a heavy machinery manufacturing center. He’s still very strong. He still has the figure of a man who grew up lugging around one-hundred-pound tires all day. We went to high school together and married a few years after we graduated. I am lucky. I made a good decision by accident. In high school we chose boyfriends blindly, pin the tail on the donkey. I thought he was handsome and that was about all I thought. So I was surprised to find, after we’d been married a few years, that my husband was someone I really love. There are things about him he’d kept hidden in school, secrets that made him precious—kindness and wonder and a beautiful singing voice—qualities that took a couple of years of life chipping away before they were revealed.
“Can you take off your clothes?” I ask when he returns.
“I like my pajamas.”
“Those aren’t pajamas. They’re underwear.”
“Not necessarily.”
He takes off his clothes anyway and looks at me once as if I were a brand-new flashlight whose bulb, for some reason, has already dimmed and malfunctioned. But I’m not brand-new. We’ve been married for almost eleven years now.
He gets back into bed. I wrap my body around the tick bite. I can see the picture of the chicken-rendering brother from Minnesota. He smiles up at me from the floor where I dropped him. I have a sister. She’d never work at a chicken plant for me. I also had a brother once. I don’t think he would have done it either. Not because he wasn’t kind, and not because he was busy with his own plans. He didn’t have any plans. My brother had trouble knowing what to make of his life. There were days he’d feel inspired by a Tony Robbins infomercial or something stupid and he’d think, Well, maybe I should get a job, as if that were something no one else had ever considered before. A job. But then my brother never could hold down any sort of position except for a few short stints at a dry cleaner in town. He reminded me of Abraham Lincoln, so tall he stooped his head, pockmarked, peach-fuzzed, and as quiet as jewelweed before it explodes. When he graduated from high school he froze, caught in the headlights, distracted by every leaf on every tree. He couldn’t move forward because he couldn’t see the point of it. “Don’t you know where forward is headed?” he asked one Thanksgiving. I didn’t have an answer. He scratched his ear. He stared out the window of our parents’ house as if there might be an answer in the drive. I don’t think he saw anything. He sat back down and stared at the carpeting. Maybe I should have said something. I know where forward is headed. I try not to think about it.
We didn’t find him for three days because we didn’t realize he was missing. That’s the saddest part of this story. He’d hanged himself from a tree, one of several that grew in a small sliver of land between my parents’ house and the neighbors’, out by a swing set untouched for years. He timbered over like a sapling when my father cut him down, his body gone stiff. Afterward, my mother, a stone-faced woman, a hard worker, kept repeating a phrase as if it were the motto of my brother’s suicide. “He was just too in love with the world.” She said it to everyone.
*
“You know The Pajama Game?” I ask my husband, my mouth close to the side of his chest. “The musical?”
“No.”
“Yeah, you do. It’s old. Has that song ‘Hernando’s Hideaway.’”
“No.”
“‘Just knock three times and whisper low that you and I were sent by Joe’?”
“Oh. Yeah. Yeah.”
“I never understood what they were doing inside Hernando’s Hideaway.”
“Hmm.” His eyes are closed.
“So what were they doing?” I ask.
“What?” He opens his eyes.
“Inside Hernando’s Hideaway?”
“What were they doing? I don’t know. Drinking, dancing, fooling around. Adult things.”
“Yeah, that’s it. Adult things. That’s why it was scary.”
“You were scared of a song?”
“That song. There was something going on inside that club, something criminal.”
“I don’t know.”
“I do.”
“Then what was it?”
“Like you said. Adult things.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, what’s the most adult thing?”
“Fucking?”
“No. Fucking’s for kids. Dying is adult.”
“Oh. Shhhh,” he says and turns to rub my face. He puts his hand on my cheek to stop my jaw from moving. He doesn’t want to hear about how people were dying inside that song’s nightclub. That that was the reason they kept the security so tight. My husband gets nervous if I say anything too bizarre. He thinks I might also end up swinging in the breeze one day. But I used to say bizarre things even before my brother died. And I don’t think suicide is contagious. “Shhh, baby,” he says one more time before shutting off the light.
*