Open to Source
by Micah Schatz
Thesmophoria
By Stephanie Johnson
On the night before he left, Lex told me about a philosopher who questioned whether the world continued once his eyes closed. “Imagine,” Lex said, “you’re like the TV. When I close my eyes, it’s like pushing the power button. Your programming might still be there, but it doesn’t really exist unless I’m watching it.” He stumped out his cigarette as a tired waitress waited for us to leave.
“If I allow you to have a life – or the illusion of a life – when I’m not seeing you, it’s because I want you to have stories to tell me when we meet again.”
His face had a soft red flush and his eyebrows arched, making his wide forehead barely visible beneath his shaggy bangs. Lex Daily was good-looking, weathered and strong from fieldwork that never wore him out. He read books at night because he couldn’t sleep. Some saw his fascination with ideas as dangerous, others saw it as a waste of time, but mostly I saw it as what made Lex different. At that time in my life, being different was the holy grail of personhood.
Out of all the girls in Watertown, I had spent the most time with Lex, but I had never been his girlfriend. I stood on the sidelines at homecoming dances, basketball games, and poetry readings that Lex had started, and I watched his effect on the hearts of women young and old. I listened to his stories about the grandness of love, how special Miss-Right-Now was, and how he was sure, absolutely, positive, no-doubt-about-it, cosmic fate sure about this one. This Mary, or Susan, or Sandra was it. He never explained what it meant, but the spark in his eye made you want to trust him.
“How’s Emily?” His newest love was the daughter of the local used car dealer.
“Entirely too consumed with financing rates.”
“Take the L out of Lover, and it’s over,” I sang to him over the dirty ashtray.
This is how it usually happened. After a few weeks of grandeur, it was gone and he had seen through the woman he invented. Lex never seemed to like who these women were when they were out of his sight.
Through it all, I was Lex’s confidante. I was sure that, despite my wishing, he had never thought of me as more. I was his late night conversation companion, his sidekick on midnight cornfield expeditions, the keeper of his secrets and hopes and, every once in a while, his fears. I was the girl left standing once the fickleness of his infatuations passed, and in that sense, I was different.
Lex once told me that Pandora was sent as a curse on man; when she opened the jar, the evils of the world flew out. Hope, he said, clung beneath the lid of the jar and never entered the world. “That’s how I think of you,” he told me. “My Hope.”
Lex decided against a fourth bottomless pot and threw a wrinkled five on the table. He slid out of the booth and told me what was really on his mind. “I’m leaving, getting on my bike and seeing what’s out there in the world.”
I felt as if the wind had been knocked out of me. I remembered when I fell out of an apple tree behind the farm. Lex had convinced me to climb behind him, promising I could see across the state line if I climbed high enough. However, all I saw was the ground approaching too fast for my liking when I put my weight on a feeble branch. But I had wanted to see what he promised so badly I took the chance. Now, he was going to parts of the country we had only dreamed about, and it didn’t sound like an invitation.
“I’ve already told my dad. My brother’s old enough to take over my chores until I come back – if I come back.”
And that’s how it was: the next morning he followed through with his plan and I felt like a television with a blown picture tube.
***
Many times, I would lie in bed at night and think about where Lex had gone. I’d imagine the frame of his bones, each one a line on a map taking him closer towards what he was looking for and farther away from the land I knew instinctively and never needed a map to guide me through. I imagined it would have been the same way with Lex. Had we been lovers, I would have instinctively known his twists and turns and the little bumps of his spine, small foothills off the flat lands of his flesh. At that time, I believed a person could walk forever on those railroad tie bumps, a cross-country journey from the base of his neck to the small of his back, and just like America, no matter how much you traveled, you could never see all there was to see.
Perhaps Lex wanted to leave quickly because slow separations only make one bitter. Perhaps, unable to leave on my own, I believed there was a world outside what I’d seen because Lex was now out of sight, yet still existing someplace I couldn’t touch because I hadn’t been there.
***
When Lex first left, the town treated him like something they had lost, as if he might appear as soon as they stopped looking for him. Women peered through shop fronts, and farmers paused from their fieldwork to steal glances of the highway that dissected their land. When, despite their constant searches and wishful thinking, Lex still failed to materialize, they decided that he himself was lost.
My grandmother was like the rest of the town, but being blood she sensed something was different for me once Lex left. I was twenty then and still taken with looking at clouds, organizing and reorganizing their patterns into fantastic tales before they drifted on. This constant dreaming made me work more slowly than my grandmother, even though I was a third her age. As we worked in the garden pulling weeds and harvesting vegetables, wiping the sweat and smearing dirt across our faces, she looked at me as though she were going to tell me something it hurt her to say.
“An earthworm can’t love a robin.”
I shook the dirt off a bunch of carrots. At that age, I hadn’t been aware that heartbreak could be written across one’s face like footprints in fresh snow. It wouldn’t be until I saw Lex years later that I would understand how disappointment could be telegraphed through wrinkled lines on a face.
“We’re simple people,” my grandmother said. She sifted a clump of earth through her fingers. “And he is, too. The difference is we know who we are and he doesn’t yet.”
I brushed her comments off then like dirt from the knees of my jeans. I had always hoped for more, a chance to be more than ordinary.
***
Lex was gone; I watched season after season replace each other. Snow melted revealing soft black field dirt and green grass. Cocoons dropped away and furry caterpillars emerged as tender, wet-winged butterflies. Red tractors moved slowly across the horizon and hay wagons filled until it looked like cut, dried grass would touch the clouds. Boys years younger than I grew from skinny children into tanned, muscled farm boys. The cotton dresses of girls, now women, grew tighter as the next generation came forth to fill spots emptied by time passing.
They smiled when you bumped into them in Dobrotz’s Grocery and patted their full, round bellies. They said things like, “Isn’t that a shame….” or “Imagine that!” and, just as they had in junior high, took pride in signing their names as Mrs. Robert or Michael so-and-so.
These were women whom men chased, whom they had to claim as if their own lives depended on it. I was never one of those women. My mother taught me to bake thick, heavy farm bread and apple pies. She taught me to mend and quilt, and my grandmother taught me to garden. The focus, it was understood early, was pragmatic. They knew that my redemption would be through practical matters. Eventually, I would make a valid contribution to a man’s household and raise strong-shouldered children who could face the hardships of the world with common sense and determination. “Hope,” my mother would tell me, as she searched my face for a trace of an outstanding feature, good thick hair like rope, or a glimpse of prettiness if I smiled, “it’s not a bad life.” The truth was, I was plain.
The plainness, my mother once told me, allowed people to take what they wanted to see in themselves from me; like white pages in a book, they could write what they wanted. Because I had no outstanding traits of my own, people weren’t motivated to construct stories about me. Instead, I was a mirror. I was built of hard work and wisdom that comes from seeing things as they are and seeing things how they could be if everything turned out all right.
***
This vision was a blessing when I took up work at Fritzie’s Shop. I got my own apartment in town and started sweeping up pieces of hair. Soon enough, I learned to cut and color. I knew how to hide a high forehead behind bangs and soften long, straight hair to take years off women’s faces. Flat, skinny hair could be permed into luscious, soft curls that added fullness and depth. When Fritzie lost her battle with arthritis, I took over most of her clients. She only came in now to review the books and catch up on gossip. With no family of her own, she told me the shop would become mine. “Hope’s Shop,” she said. “Sounds nice. As if you can get more than just a cut and color – you can get a whole new you.”
***
Even after nearly ten years, the memory of our last evening lingered as if it were yesterday. It became easy for me to understand why Lex had a reputation for getting what he wanted. Some said it was through sheer determination: the mere idea of being wanted sometimes convinced one to want.
If Lex had noticed me, perhaps he recognized himself in my longing and understood his infatuation with the girls he idolized diminished once the girls saw him as worthy. Maybe he understood someone could never live up to other people’s expectations. With intimacy came responsibility. While I didn’t know it then, I would fare no better than Lex did when asked to live up to this challenge.
***
My mother grew impatient with my “moping.” Her fears never materialized in the quiet moments we shared in the kitchen or over a cool glass of lemonade on the front porch on sticky summer evenings. Instead, they appeared publicly while she sat in my chair at Fritzie’s shop waiting for her perm to set.
It began with a sigh as she flipped through the pages of Home and Garden or Cosmo. She’d close her eyes for a moment before snapping the magazine shut and present her argument subtly, disguised as a conversation with Fritzie.
“Fritzie,” she’d start, “the mister has given me a life’s worth of work, cleaning and cooking and all, but there’s nothing like a strong man to keep the bed sheets warm.”
“Very true, Dora,” Fritzie answered. She turned the pages of her Soap Digest. “I find that I enjoy the comforts of a good electric blanket when the frost sets.”
“I worry about my Hope.”
It wasn’t as though there had never been anyone else. I had seen other men on and off – Jimmy Dodds, Carl Jackson, Jay Watson, and the teacher who had spent only a year at our middle school – the possibilities had existed. But I was never able to say this is it. Jimmy ate with his mouth open, Carl referred to his genitals as “Little Carl,” Jay was incapable of a conversation beyond high school football team stats and drinking stories, and the teacher – although intellectually stimulating – left. With the exception of the teacher, my mother had assured me these were trivial things, things a woman could change in a man with enough time, but I wasn’t after changing anyone. None of these men had inspired me to see myself differently. After each encounter, I found myself waiting for Lex.
I thought of reminding my mother that I hadn’t lived a life void of relationships – that instead of inspiring me to find someone, it had made me want to wait for the right one – but it would do no good. So, I remained silent. In Lex’s absence, I had done one better than find a replacement for him: I had gotten a library card.
***
I carried my latest acquisition from the stacks with me wherever I went, reading and re-reading tough passages on breaks between clients, in line at the grocers, and pumping gas into my car. I read while dinner was cooking, while bread was cooling, and until I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer at night. Each time I went to the library, I checked the back of the book and searched for Lex’s name on the checkout sheet. Many times his name was followed by a date, and I would try to remember what we had been doing at that time in our lives. In his absence, the library added books to its collections, and I read those, too. I wrote down the best parts or questions I had in a notebook, so I could remember everything I wanted to tell him when we met again.
I read everything, but I preferred Greek Philosophy and Classical Mythology. In particular, I was fascinated by the Greeks’ three different words for love: Eros for passionate yearning, Philia for the nature of brotherhood and friendship, and Agape for God’s love for his creations and for an unselfish, loyal, and benevolent concern for the good of another.
I wondered what it would be like to quest after uncovering the nature of love. Love, a thing so fragile and intangible, a feeling, a tingle, a sense of connection and disconnection all at once. It took me a while to screw up my courage, but I finally wrote in my notebook, what form of the Greek word love best applies to your feelings for me? I stared at it for a while, soothing myself with the knowledge that I had written it on its own page, that I could rip it out as easily as I had written it. I turned the page and tried not to think about it.
***
Sometimes when business was slow, Fritzie would ask what I was reading. She’d ease back in a pink chair after spinning it to full height and look at the ceiling and talk. I liked talking about what I was reading because it was a way to keep Lex as part of my life.
Mostly, I’d tell Fritzie about the myths since that held her interest the longest. She was as fascinated as I was with how the gods punished humans. In particular, she was baffled by the story of Artemis and Actaeon.
“A stag?” She turned her ankles in small circles like a child on a church pew.
“The mind of a man inside the body of a deer. He was aware of everything that was happening to him.”
“All for catching a peek at her naked? She may have been a goddess, but she sure didn’t know anything about men.”
“His hunting dogs tore him to shreds.”
Fritzie sat straight up in her chair. “That story’s better than Passions, especially now that Timmy’s dead.”
Fritzie loved her soaps, especially Passions and the “doll” that the witch Tabitha had brought to life. The living doll consumed non-alcoholic martinis, which Fritzie thought was the best thing in the world. The actor who played Timmy died on the same day his character died on the show. Fritzie and I had spent many coffee breaks trying to decide what, if anything, that could mean before Fritzie decided not to think about it anymore because it was too painful. Soap Digest had promised that Timmy would be resurrected, an event that had kept Fritzie watching the show.
“Tell me about the hungry guy.”
“Tantalos tried to feed the gods the flesh of his own son, so they punished him by making him stand in a river. He was always hungry and thirsty. A fruit tree hung over his head but whenever he tried to take a bite, the wind blew the fruit out of his reach. If he was thirsty and tried to drink the water, the stream’s level dropped.”
“That’s awful.”
I had to agree. The Greeks had a way of punishing people with the sins they’d committed. Characters always suffered because they were proud, believed they could claim more than they were owed.
“Tell the story of Hope. We need to talk about something good. And then I’m going to make us another pot of coffee.”
I told her about Pandora, the first woman, and how she had opened the jar of evils, turning War, Famine, Disease, and Labor loose on the world. And Hope, at least according to this book, hid beneath the lid of the jar.
“Some people think the jar represents the womb. Once we bring forth children, we can’t shield them from the evils of the world.”
Fritzie screwed up her face. “That’s not very optimistic.” She went into the back and I heard her running water for the coffee. Once she had started the pot, she reappeared.
“Hope,” she said, and I turned instinctively. “It eventually came out from under the lid, right?”
“The story doesn’t say.”
Fritzie looked at me with the same pale, sunken-eye look she’d worn for a week when she found out Timmy wasn’t coming back. “What if Hope never entered the world?”
Before I could answer, she shook her head and smiled. “Those Greeks,” she said. “They’re good candidates for Prozac.”
***
That night, I tried to read, but as I lay in bed, I couldn’t stop thinking about what it meant if Hope never left the jar.
I thought about Fritzie. No amount of wishing was going to bring Timmy back beyond montages that memorialized his character in flashback. Hope and desire, it seemed, had nothing to do with the real world and its inhabitants. If anything, it seemed to make reality harsher. Fritzie not only lost Timmy once, but she also lost him a second time. Perhaps Hope was put in the jar not because it was meant to redeem us from the evils of the world, but rather because it was one of the evils of the world.
The thought unsettled me. What did it mean for a woman to wait, tied to the television, hoping for the resurrection of a character? How could it be any different than a lonely woman waiting for the return of a crush, one who couldn’t be trusted, even if he did return, to share the same sentiments? And, failing his return, how could that woman be any different than millions of television viewers who, as they turned off the television after watching Timmy’s death, would soon learn that the actor himself had died while doctors deliberated performing heart surgery? As I lay on my bed under the reading lamp, my chest broke in half and a dizzy spin like an all-day drunk hit my head.
I had sustained myself for years on memories and hope; it was my nature, like most people’s, to believe that my life would end happily, that no matter what was endured along the way, the end result would be worth it, or perhaps that suffering was even somehow necessary.
While Agamemnon had journeyed to Troy, Clytemnestra had taken a lover, and upon Agamemnon’s return, the two had killed him. After reading the play, I felt I knew how to avoid the tragedy telegraphed to me in the lines of text: losing interest in replacing Lex, I decided to await his return. Like Penelope waited for Odysseus, I decided to stay loyal. But alone in my room, I had never considered that the story I created wouldn’t have a happy ending. That seemed too awful to think about.
***
I was cutting Sugar Dybek’s hair on a warm August afternoon. Fritzie came in late. She was anxious, first sitting at the desk and rifling through the appointment book, then tapping part way through a number on the calculator and clearing it. She paced in front of the shop’s window, then stood with her hand on the door. Finally, she stood next to the chair and looked at Mrs. Dybek’s hair. “Hope, I need to talk to you in the back.”
I finished Sugar’s cut, and as she stood to write a check at the front desk, it seemed as though Fritzie couldn’t wait for her to leave. I had never seen Fritzie impatient before. Our town wasn’t one for impatience; we passed the days with small talk about weather, babies, and corn and milk prices.
The door had barely swung closed behind Sugar, when Fritzie spilled her news. Her voice was low and raspy, and her face set hard. “Hope,” she said. Her gnarled fingers worried against each other. “He’s here.”
It took a moment for her words to make sense. Desire burned through my cotton shirt, up my throat, and into my face, a heat so strong and intense that first shimmered when I realized Lex had befriended me when we were fifteen and continued even when I was alone. In a moment of certainty, I believed the world had a sense of order and justice and goodwill. Then thought abandoned me, leaving only the thud-thud-thud pounding of blood rushing through my body and my fingers tingling like electricity grazed their tips. I felt as if I were everywhere and nowhere, as though with a sudden pop and fizz a picture had filled a dark television screen.
“Heard Lex was back when I stopped at the Kwik Trip for coffee and cigarettes. He rode in late last night. His cycle is in his daddy’s driveway.”
My consciousness perched in my chest. My being had centered there, right over my heart.
“Get out of here,” Fritzie said, as if she could tell I was already gone.
***
I went home to wait. I put on coffee and baked a cinnamon apple pie. It cooled on the counter as the sun went down. The heat of the day and the oven made it almost unbearable in my tiny apartment. Sweat trickled down my neck, soaking my shirt. I didn’t know when Lex would stop by, but I knew I needed to wait.
When I imagined this day, I expected a million thoughts to cross my mind. What would he look like? Would he still recognize me even if the thickness of time passing had spread across my thighs and the gravity of loneliness had added new lines to my face? Where does one begin to cover ten years’ worth of time evaporating? Hollowness like hunger filled my stomach and my brain focused on only two words – Lex Daily – as if to actually speak his name would curse his arrival.
He knocked on the door just before the late evening news, and with the small gesture of turning the lock, I opened the door and Lex filled my tiny kitchen. The man at the center of my life returned, a little older, a little paler, a little tired. His hair was longer than I remembered, and I could see the circles under his eyes. I wondered how far he’d driven the night before. I imagined his journey had taken him farther than a night of sleep in his old bed could erase. “Hope,” he said. His eyes sparked and my heart felt like gasoline.
He eased himself into a kitchen chair. We ate apple pie and ice cream while we waited for a new pot of coffee to brew. The tart taste of the apples against the cool sweetness of vanilla ice cream combined the years of missing him and the swooping feeling of seeing him again. I had expected him to be brimming with stories, but he remained quiet, avoiding all but the necessary thank you’s. I felt foolish, remembering how I imagined reunions would be bursting with how have you been’s and what have you been doing’s. Perhaps there was no way to gracefully tell someone where you had been and who you’d become in ten years.
When I poured the coffee, he held my wrist. “I hear you’re cutting hair at Fritzie’s Shop.” He raised an eyebrow. His hand lingered on my wrist.
He touched his hair. “Would you mind? I’m all for a new me.”
“The shop’s closed.”
“Here.”
He washed his hair in the kitchen sink while I found my scissors in the sewing basket beside my bed. When I returned, I found him seated on a chair in the middle of the tiny kitchen, an old towel wrapped around his neck, and he appeared to me like a long-lost prince returned from battle to claim his throne.
I combed through his hair, as he sat with his eyes closed. “I don’t want to see it until you’re done. End result, not process.”
I pulled a length of his hair through my fingers and slowly made the first cut. As his hair hit the floor, I fought back the urge to cry.
***
It’s hard to say how what happened next began, or whether Eros, Philia, or Agape prevailed. In recounting it, I run the risk of sentimentality or of revising it in my memory to add sentimentality that perhaps was never there. In light of this, I can offer only facts. I stopped cutting to refill his coffee cup. As I leaned forward with the pot, he opened his eyes. He held my hand and kissed me on the cheek softly, like the first sprinkle of rain after a long drought. His kisses circled my face, eventually finding my mouth. Everything inside me broke loose like a line of crows on a phone line taking flight together. Lex Daily was standing over me, removing the coffee pot from my hand, placing it absentmindedly on the counter top, and pulling me by the hand down the narrow hallway.
I thought to tell him a million things: how I should finish the cut, how I never expected a postcard, how I kept a notebook, how I had been waiting quietly for this moment.
In the few moments it took to stumble the length of the short hallway, I remembered how Lex and I used to lie in the long field grass looking at the stars. I remembered what he told me about crushes and the pop and fizz of feeling love, like electricity, making every part of you alive – even your fingertips sensitive to the breeze blowing in before a storm. I remembered all he told me about what he thought the world was like beyond the blacktopped highways of Watertown and the rush he thought accompanied being part of something bigger and unknown. I focused on knowing this Lex, the boy I knew lying on the ground, looking up at the sky when others were dreaming alone in their beds, the one who talked about things in the abstract, things with endless possibilities if one were just willing to rush after them.
***
As he moved a piece of hair from my eyes, he asked the question I knew was coming the way winter follows autumn. “Want to know why I came back?”
I rolled to face the wall. When asked, I didn’t know; I had only imagined and dreamed. I always believed he would return to this sleepy town with its tomato patches and cornfields.
“I was with this girl in Memphis for about a month… there was trouble…”
I didn’t say anything. Rather, I thought of time beneath cotton sheets and sweat-covered muscles. My mouth was dry and my throat tight. I wanted ice water, but the kitchen was impossibly far away.
“Hope?”
I turned to study his face. Was he asking me to see something strong in him? Something that says whatever scars you’re carrying, whatever wrong you’ve done, it’s somehow worth the wisdom you’ve gained? Perhaps he needed me to name him Odysseus or Icarus, a heroic man welcomed home by a final trail and a faithful wife or an arrogant boy drowned by melted wax and unfaithful wings.
He was awkward now, half of his hair cut short and the other half long and sun-damaged. He waited for my reply. Instead, I could think only of the train track bumps on his back and all the places in America to which I have never been.