Two Syllables

by Virginia Laurie

He was lovely then. A ruffled parakeet. We were crisp as carrot sticks and spent our days sweeping peanut shells off the bar floor. In May he called me a bouquet and took me to a field of sunflowers. Under their unrelenting chins, he sliced me in half like a diorama. There was thatch threaded through the belt-loops of my jeans. I shook like a frog standing up.

By July, I stood up with outsized force, marveling at the ache and the strength of my quadriceps. He was still a bird. Mouth an arrow. In August, there were pillows and I rested around him. He was kind, then, and grateful for me. He kissed my nose, nibbled my earrings. At night he took the trash out. He drove me home. Once he asked me where I’d go if I escaped this city. The sun was bright that day, the pavement smug, and this confused me. I told him I just wanted to be there, with him, in that moment. He left me then; I could sense it. His lips curled then flattened— a shallow rip. Then everything was almost the same. Right, he said. Me too.

In September we burned our timecards, lived off orange peels and pennies and his controlling parents. They wanted him to take the LSAT. They want us to marry, he told me, pitch flat as day old soda. But it was November by then, and I was hungry for a happily ever after around a long table. My body craved gravy.

Maybe he’d remember me, I thought, and how the garlic hissed as it hit the pan. He’d squeezed my lower abdomen the night we tried to make tortellini by hand. It was still summer then. Scarves and time layered between us. I wanted to be warm as the sunlit bars of dirt between the stalks had been. So I reached for him.

*

One week after Christmas, while I was wearing my favorite snow cap, he took us to the far corner booth of the lounge where we’d started working. He bought two hot toddies that left condensation kisses on the sticky wood. I put my hat on my thigh and waited.

He said, I want you to be my wife. Not, Will you marry me?

Still, I agreed, sealing the promise with alcohol spiced lips. I was already pushing flour around the pan in my mind, already pushing out a redhead baby with a cloyingly Gaelic name every time I twisted my ring— sterling.

We were married six months later, by the church of course, and I wore his mother’s gown, mine being gone since fourth grade. My father, paralyzed by the same accident, was planted by the front pew with his brakes on, jowls draping over his lapel corsage like curtains. My husband’s father, a leasing agent, escorted me down the freezing cathedral aisle. We did not write our vows or host a rehearsal.

The basement reception was just long enough for me to kiss my high school girlfriend’s cheek, eat half a stuffed pepper, then demure to my role as bride— unflappably serene, smiling without teeth.

*

The entire first night it went unnoticed.

He unlaced my sequined bodice hastily, leaving me in my shift. I stood in the rented room, stiff as a starched sheet. Since utility was woven through my fibers, I quickly gave way under my bridegroom’s starving hands. He wasn’t a bird any longer, and I was not a carrot. I was not even a woman. I was a man’s woman. This man’s woman.

For the first time I noted the rough shave of his chin against my fragile breast skin as he kissed my neck instead of my lips, which stayed sealed shut. Stay sealed when he pushed himself into the wrong entrance, perhaps by accident. Stayed sealed when he finally grunted, eyes closed and not for me. Then he rolled away and returned with wet cloth, face already grey with fatigue. But he cleaned me up with the precision of an auto mechanic working over a Caddie. He said Thanks and slumped to his dreams. Yeast billowing on each exhalation, frosting on his ring finger, tinged face towel between us on a four-star quilt.

He woke up hungry. He ordered room service, two Benedict’s— one salmon, one crab cake— then touched himself. He began to pet my hair as I lay still on the pillow. He cupped the back of my head like a cantaloupe, lifting then lowering my skull towards his stiffening erection. I tried to open my mouth— to take him in or tell him to stop, I’m still not sure— but no matter what I did, my lips would not, could not, part.

In quick terror I moaned, and what might’ve been a scream upwelled much dirtier and keening, like an animal laid low. I kept moaning and grabbed my hair, at least the strands I could reach. The noise of my fear became wolffish and where before they’d strengthened my husband’s arousal, he now flagged and frowned. Fine, he said, letting go and reaching for his pants.

Pouting only a little, he answered the door when our food arrived. The silver trays released steam and a colorful diversion of fruit next to two overstuffed English muffins. It smelled like a fantasy. I couldn’t eat any of it without my mouth. I sat there disassembling the meal with my fork as though raking a Zen Garden.

My husband dove in. He didn’t notice my situation, lost in his fresh pleasure.

Later, we swam in the pool, then the ocean, where he took me under the salt. No words passed between us. At dinner, I had what he ordered for us, picking at it with my utensils yet again. I buried most of it in napkins when he finally went to pee. As we sat in the generically upscale in-lobby bistro, I worried how to tell him that my mouth was broken. I decided to write it down. But by the time the lava cakes came, I knew it wouldn’t be an issue for him. He never asked me questions, I realized, so I was saved by nodding— Uh huh. Uh huh. Uh huh. Head tilt. Maybe. He was cheerful the rest of the trip, where each morning I woke him with patient hands, playing defense offensively on our borrowed marital bed. I stopped listening to him eventually. He hated the candidate and explained the economy and swore he’d have made it big if he’d put the effort in. On our last day, we stood on the curb holding luggage, and he hailed us a cab. I watched his bangs tangle on his brow.

I couldn’t remember how handsome he’d been during my first shift. I vaguely recalled him chewing on his thumb next to a shelf of pale liquor. His hair was neither brown nor blonde nor gray, but it had danced like a fiddle in the reflected light.

He asked me to hang out the first night we closed together. It surprised me as I hadn’t thought he knew my name, much less sensed my clumsy crush. In fact, I don’t remember him ever asking my name. I must have told him at some point. At some point he must’ve told me his.

*

Yet now, twenty-three years after I spoke my last sentence— “I do.” —I can’t recall it. When my only child, Christopher, asks me if he’s named after his father, I shake my head. The paper pad between us is blank except for the most recent message. I love you, Darling. Chris was warm from the moment I felt him quicken within. Now he’s a fading fire I sit by for residual heat. I wear very heavy socks. My hair is still long.

Today it is pulled back in a silver bird clip I inherited from my mother-in-law when the melanoma took her. I want to look nice at the funeral.

My husband has always taken pride in my appearance and how unlined the region of my mouth has remained these last two decades. I profited him up until the day he died— Monday of last week. The service is two hours from now, and I linger at the breakfast table next to a mug Chris made in grade school, full to the brim with cold coffee. I don’t drink any of course, but I like to feel the weight of it, and its heat.

Chris is with his first girlfriend, getting lunch or pretending to. They met at the winery after I forced him to find a summer job. I’m alone in the house, and it’s quiet as a flower. I feel I died instead and was reborn as a matchstick.

The home phone rings, and because I’m the only one here, I answer it on instinct. “H-”
I can’t believe it. A tickle of breath filters through the clarinet of my mouth. It warms my chapped lips which are moving at last.

I try again, and again, my mouth opens.

The cool air shocks my tongue, and the world tastes like ice. I smile, and my upper lip cracks like a glowstick. Something beeps upstairs. “Hell,” I say. “Oh,” I say. I say Hello.

My name is Lily.

 

Virginia Laurie is a visual artist, educator, and MFA candidate at University of North Carolina Wilmington. www.virginialaurie.com