When she paints, she puts her dark hair up messy and wears one of my white work shirts, smudged with gold ocher and naphthol red.
“Marie, that’s not one of my good ones, is it?” I asked when I noticed she had taken another of my shirts. She didn’t look up from her painting.
“I don’t think it is,” she said. But it was brand new, and she started laughing.
“I’m sorry, baby; I didn’t check. I’ll buy you another,” she said. But I didn’t really mind, mostly because I squeezed a five-ounce tube of her cobalt violet into the toilet later that night, but also because sometimes she’d paint in that shirt without pants on. She said she liked the way it felt on her skin.
She always liked those shirts, even after I had worn them all day. She’d insist on washing them, never letting me do it; and I’d catch her burying her face into them before she tossed them into the washer.
“I like your smell, okay?” she said once when I laughed at her for it.
I found her one night, washing laundry in her pajamas. She stood motionless at the washer, her glass of whiskey set next to the fabric softener and detergent. I thought she was watching the water fill the barrel, but I realized she had a shirt in her hands. She was just staring at one of my shirts clutched in her hands with a look on her face I had never seen before: eyebrows furrowed, her mouth so tight and frowning, like she was going to break. And then a noise – some mix of a sigh, a laugh, a sob – and she dropped the shirt into the washer before tilting her head back for a long drink.
Right around the time she stopped looking at me when she spoke to me, she stopped washing my shirts altogether.
The faucet is dripping. I can hear it from here. It’s been dripping since June, right around the time the firm began giving me more hours and I had almost saved up enough for the car. Marie started leaving hot-pink Post-its on the refrigerator because she’d usually be asleep by the time I came home.
Maybe you can fix it, cariño.
And I could have, but who wants to deal with that shit right after work? With a soft girl in my bed and M*A*S*H reruns on late night TV? I’d tear these off the refrigerator and toss them into the trash before getting a beer. These notes turned into
Fix the damn sink.
Which gave way to
Neither do I.
And when Thanksgiving rolled around, they were simply:
But she doesn’t leave them anymore, and the faucet is still dripping.
I walk into the bedroom, and Marie’s head is buried in a tangle of arms. I sit at the edge of the bed, wanting to – I don’t know – say something. I stare at my shoes instead.
“Why don’t you go for a drive?” I hear her say.
I turn to her, surprised she’s still awake. But she hasn’t moved, and her breathing is deep and slow, and the apartment is quiet except for the rhythmic ping, pinging of the water into the sink.
But a drive sounds like a good idea.
This time of year, it’s city cold, where there’s no snow to blanket or insulate, only cutting wind and ice. Salt from the street coats car windshields and the pavement, making everything a dingy gray, but not my car. Parked carefully in the garage for an extra 150 dollars per month is my car, my ’74 Ventura GTO, with her seventeen-by-nine Cragar rims and six whole inches of backspacing. That paint job? Fire-coral bronze, metallic. And those are stainless-steel, chrome-coated bumpers; there isn’t anything that’s denting those things. Let me tell you, on a nice summer day, this thing catches the sun and nearly blinds awed onlookers. This car, my Goat, the only thing I can ever really remember wanting as a kid. And that’s when I started saving for it, as a stupid kid hoarding change from between the couch cushions; and I never stopped since. Whenever I thought about turning down extra hours at the firm, whenever I went to bed at three in the morning only to have to waken two hours later, whenever mornings at the office seemed to drag and I wanted just to make a break for it at lunch, I thought of that car. I kept pictures of custom GTOs at my desk; the rims from this, the extended chrome exhaust pipe from that, the pearl-gray – no, the green-metallic – finish from this one. And now I have it. And for the first time since I can remember, this car is just a car.
