Movement in Four Parts; Scenes as Snapshots

I.
They drive all day in the winter air, windows down, cold like they cannot catch their breath. Balancing out the sunroof, camera clicked, accelerating away intoxicated silly, they will dream of this later, hear of it in someone else’s song, double take it in the rearview. They will smell the winter in some other icetime, shake their heads to something lost.

Later—a cactus in the window, silhouetted by a Pennsylvania sky, November and blue.

II.
From the doorway he says I take too much shit. Only, he is not saying it to me. He is looking at me but saying it to them and he is saying she takes too much shit.

In my office, he leans back and presses his foot against the wall I repainted the week before. His shoe leaves a print. He tells me he doesn’t understand why I’m so unhappy.

I want to tell him to wash off the shoe mark.

III.
“Admit it,” she says.

“Nothing to confess.” He shifts his weight from foot to foot, then stands with his fists in his pocket.

She leans over the railing. The porch banister is glossy and slick with dew. The moisture soaks through her sleeves. She needs to know about an almond tree, with almonds still green, and whether he has seen one growing, in a walled garden with sweet basil. Or what about cranberry fields flooded for harvest, red beads floating and glinting with water? In Maine, maybe, just before the leaves changed?

He takes his hands out of his pocket and steps closer.

“Remember that time?” he asks.

“I remember not being able to get warm again,” she says.

IV.
When I insist I’m going to break, he takes me to ride go-karts. He’s relieved I’m no longer pressing his Honda Civic’s gas pedal to the floor. We laugh. We forget. But he can’t keep up; I lap him.

Another weekend, we drive to the coast and sit on the harbor rocks. We leave responsibility behind. I’m so sick my lungs hurt when I inhale the freezing air, but I don’t care.

“Don’t want to go back to real life,” I say.

On the bright blue water, white sailboats escape to open sea.

“This is real life,” he tells me.

—C.