Today I decided to revise a short story, "Palindrome," I wrote when I was twenty-three. It's about an insecure voice teacher who gets involved with a widower whose dead wife happens to share her name. I want to post my fiction and poetry as it's still developing -- so please, I welcome feedback. Today I tightened up two sections of the story. I'm not working through it chronologically at this point. I'm still trying to get a feel for the characters.
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She called it dyslexing. Her grandfather had given her a word like a gift when she was six:
racecar, a palindrome.
Now, vocalizing was a form of meditation. Half-stepping into her high register she could travel, abandon the physical to hover as bodiless language and pitch.
Memory sounded.
The simplest scale might trigger afternoons rocking side-by-side on the porch with her grandfather, Margaret staring at his scuffed patent leather shoes planted firmly on the planked floor. She could never get her feet to touch. That was when she first understood envy as tangible, envy as not being able to reach what others could. And death. That was when she first understood death, those weeks she and her mother stayed in the white-washed, two-bedroom house in Currituck County. She spent the summer circling the yard and touching fallen Granny Smith apples with her bare feet. They mushed with pressure. She could dig her nails into the peels and leave half-moons. Sometimes small worms, pink like slag glass, emerged.
Once, she asked her grandfather if apples were alive. He was chewing tobacco and spitting into a brass jug, and the setting sun reflected in the brass made her shield her eyes. Margaret tucked her tongue into her cheek to imagine how a wad of tobacco felt. He spoke to her in profile.
Fish ain't like an apple, Magpie. Her goldfish had died that morning. She had won it at the State Fair only the day before -- had carried it all the way from Raleigh in a bowl in her lap, water sloshing onto her clothes and seeping into the seat so that her mother had to pull over on the Interstate shoulder to lay down a towel. That morning, finding it belly-up, she traced its slimy fins with a calm, curious finger, imitated its pop-eyed expression in the mirror. She didn't cry, but climbed back into bed and pulled the blanket over her head. She breathed trapped, hot air. Death seemed like a sheet, like a ping-pong ball tossed underhand. She stayed like that for a long time. Her mother called Margaret's grandfather into the room. He slipped a cigar box under the covers. Only then did Margaret sit up. She watched him reach a splotchy hand into the bowl on her dresser and drop the fish into an open handkerchief.
We're gonna bury it, he said, taking out a fountain pen from his trousers pocket.
What was it named, Magpie. She managed to tell him she hadn't named it. He pointed to the box, Racecar Brand Cigars.
Racecar. Spelled the same either end you start from. They buried Racecar under the apple tree. Her grandfather whittled a pine fish, tiny spike at its base, to mark the grave, and they rocked together until dark.
Two weeks later, when she found her grandfather collapsed in the yard, death was irrevocably white, the same either end you start from.
*
David began as a blinking red light on her answering machine, a pulsating star she feared would explode if brought into unrecorded time. After she finally listened to his message, she made his name into a vocal warm-up exercise, practiced
David as an ascending chromatic scale, along with
I am 38 and
I can't date online. She waited three days to call. When he answered, she hung up before he had a chance to move past breath, prayed he didn't have Caller ID. She tried again two hours later. It rang only once before the machine picked up, but David picked up at the same time, so there were two of him, overlapping, one taped and one live. Margaret heard him fumbling with buttons. She kept yelling "Hello?" into the receiver, even after he managed to shut off the machine. "Shit. Hold on. Margaret? Margaret?"
"Hello? This is Margaret," she said.
"This is David," he said, and laughed. "David Alpert."
"This is Margaret," she said again.
He explained to her that the night before, a recently fired employee had used a duplicate key to break into his pet store and remove all the lids on the tanks. "I spent my morning searching for reptiles."
"They were still alive?"
"Mostly," David said. "Some of the fish jumped."
Margaret wound the phone cord tight around her wrist. "I read somewhere that fish have hardly any memory. They experience the same moment over and over, believing it's new."
"Ah, yes. Have you ever had deja-vu?"
"No," Margaret said.
"Have you ever had deja-vu?" David exhaled like a winded runner. "Okay, new question. Do you have pets?"
"No. Well, I had a cat once. Nora. She ran away. And a goldfish when I was a kid."
"You have a nice voice." Margaret touched her throat's hollow, the spooned out skin above her larynx, with two fingers. Her body lightened, spine vibrating. "I teach voice," she offered. "I went to UNC Greensboro, studied opera. Music education."
"I know," he said. "From your ad."
"I've never --" she fumbled.
"Let me take you to dinner."
They set a date for Japanese food the next night. She recognized him immediately from his description -- tall, early forties, thinning hair, "a man who likes to figure out how things work and how to make them better" -- but was surprised that he was so delicately built. She noticed his hands, the skin almost transparent. He pulled a white rose out of his jacket and hugged her, smelled like damp fur and woodsy cologne. When he pushed her chair in for her at the table, he complimented her on her sleeveless lavender sweater. Margaret liked how his dark eyes flickered during conversation. She liked the black stubble on his chin, too, and how he shook his whole head when he laughed, which was most of the time.
"I found a baby black snake in some coral today," he said, over shrimp tempura. "This is news because the coral is on the opposite side of the store."
"That's frightening," Margaret said, and smiled.
They felt an ease with each other.
He told her about his wife, Maggie, who had died of ovarian cancer two years ago. He said she wasn't sick until they found it, so he always wondered if it would have gone away if they hadn't found it. Isn't that sometimes the way he said, but she was thinking about the sound of Margaret and Maggie, Maggie and Margaret. She moved her napkin from her lap to the table. She uncrossed her legs to leave. Their waitress appeared, asking if they wanted more hot tea. Margaret flattened her napkin back in her lap. The moment had passed.
After dinner, they lingered beside Margaret's Honda, David with his hands in his pockets. He explained that he'd had a long day at Pet Bazaar, but wanted to get together again. Soon.
"You don't go by Dave, do you?"
"Depends."
"I won't call you Dave." She was thinking
evade, spelling backwards. She could hear her grandfather's voice.
"OK," he said.
Margaret turned to unlock her car door, but before opening it, spun back around to face David. He leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. She cupped his face and offered the side of one trembling palm to his lips, to the wet of his tongue.
When David proposed, eight months later, ring tucked in a California roll, Margaret accepted. She tried not to think about the picture of Maggie on the bottom shelf in his workshop, book-ending, unassumingly, Hoyle's
Card Games.
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