SILVER by Victoria Waddle
When you’re years past serious arguments, you two raise eyebrows just about everywhere. Not other people’s but your own, in the hundred and one ways you respond to what’s around you, right now, in your favorite restaurant. You’ve begun to live a life of signaling, you realize now.
True things remain true, sure. Of course you should have sown some wild oats before you got married. It’s also true that you are celebrating your twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and that the wild oats truth doesn’t matter anymore. Few old truths do. They amount to no more than your mother’s spoon collection, a series of silver-plated names, locating former places and times, things that can be polished or left to tarnish, depending on who’s coming to town for a visit.
In the fraught days when such things mattered, you resented that you were the one adventureless, took dark steps down the hallway, past the African masks, six of them, representing tribes from various areas of the continent, mementos of a stint in the Peace Corps stretched into a continental tour.
You hadn’t met him then, in the period of Africa. When you did, you heard the stories of a woman delivering a hairy oblong mass in place of a baby, and how the village pointed to witchcraft as the cause. Then there was the boy, his student, curious and open, who was bitten by a snake on the way to school, who died in the wet red clay on the road. You knew so little of the world and pictured all as it was told, sadness and fascination commingling. The world was so hard, even at its easiest. He had seen the world far from its easiest, had seen true suffering and true happiness, too. You hoped to stand close to all that.
The slides were a different sort of revelation, the shockingly close black rhino and the screaming gorillas. More essential was the girl, a fellow Peace Corps volunteer, but something more, surely. Sometimes walking down the hall of masks, you’d wonder about her. After such an intense experience together, what had pulled them apart so quickly? Was it you, in your nose-to‑the-grindstone perfection? Always knowing that you couldn’t take on any real sense of their origins, you sometimes took the masks from the wall and placed them over your face. With this, they were even more distant – wooden, hot and ill-fitting. That is, they weren’t actually masquerade, but decoration.
Where were they now? When had they come off the walls? It must have been with the move to the first real house, after the first real baby. You’d worked ceaselessly to gain a yard for him, for a place where he could play with that practice baby, the dog. You’d packed boxes that have remained packed ever since. Your walls filled with photos of the children you’d created yourselves.
The children, too, came unhooked from the walls and rooms, in a collegial separation, and then in a disconnection more permanent in space-time, a life change that leaves you pondering what little you’ve learned of quantum physics, of that strange way that protons, hurled to separate cities and states, will, despite the many miles apart, complement one another, the positive and the negative, if someone only bothers to take their measure. So, too, the charged energy of connections to your faraway children, planted in three areas of a vast country, learning. The aching arc of the forlorn, snapping, electrical.
You walk down that hallway row of their faces, the three repeated over time. All appearing to be the same baby, so much alike they were. Before you unchained yourself from expectations, from that constant tugging toward a narrative arc that could never be your story, you bristled when he’d asked, too frequently, “Which one is this?” And point at the infant you could so easily distinguish by the slight variation of his eye color, by the outfit he wore and your memory of buying it, something nice for portrait day.
When you were finally released of the grinding gravity of your choices, you found that you could float into a moonwalk of meaningfulness. You still carry the past, that boulder that brings you to familiar ground between leaps. You are still, thirty years in, hard at work at a job that has become a part of your definition. And you will continue at it for some time hence, carrying through on the promise you breathed into the ear of each baby at your breast. All those boys would have open time and open opportunity to create. They would trip the light fantastic down a paved road.
Keeper of promises. Another naming of mother and wife.
You’ve forgotten the menu in your musing. You take it up again, quickly decide on the prix fixe meal because you like mushrooms and you like strawberries in your dessert. Everything here is good, but you always pick chicken as a compromise between eating the beef that means you don’t care about sentient animals at all and eating the tofu, which gives you a gut ache.
He looks over the menu and you don’t say much. He’d been forgetful walking out of the house, had to return to get his jacket while you waited in the car, a thing that used to drive you crazy, when you deemed it a passive-aggressive control. Now you check your email on your cell.
A younger person looking on might find this strange. A younger you would have found it strange. You look up at the artwork, a large male nude, genitals covered with a sheet or towel. He is collapsed on the floor in a corner, arm across his face. This has always disturbed you. You are one who worries about fictional figures, about what reality drives them into a work of art.
The red brick is dark, the tables covered in white fabric. You like the contrast, the dark wood that frames the windows. You’ve come here late, for the last seating, because you want to stay long enough to hear the band, one that your husband has joked sounds like the Allman Brothers on psilocybin. They are setting up on the tiny stage at the front of the room, less than fifty feet from your table. Their rock form of rhythm and blues dates back beyond your early memories of music. You’re not sure where you formed this taste, but both of you have it, have played air guitars together in the living room in celebration of it.
When you turn back to ask him what he’s having, you glance at the skylight on the other side of the room, past the dividers. A full moon hangs exactly in its center. This perfect gift comes to you at the same time that the wine arrives and you point as it is being poured. Even the waiter stops to drink it in.
The two of you continue to watch. The moon is on the move and becomes uncentered. The tapping of your wine glasses so silent that it is not quite a toast, but just so, a thing heard only between you. “Twenty-five years,” he says, a smiling thank you, and you think that, barring tragedy, you two are in the center of a fifty-year frame, not rising, but slowly sinking to the lower edges.
There’s a lot of chatter behind you, in the bar that you passed on the way to your table. It’s higher than you are now; you stepped down into the main restaurant and now look up to see the forming crowd, surprised that all these young people are waiting for the band, for this particular music. You like the bar, with its sawdust on the floor, its personality quite apart from the more serious tables. On infrequent Fridays, you meet your girlfriends there directly after work. You always arrive a bit early to indulge your fascination with the floor, the scrawl that appears from the pub stools scraping through the sawdust repeatedly, a cipher of the lunch crowd, of the men surrounding you. Sometimes you find letters there, spelling out nothing that you understand. This won’t stop you from checking the next time.
The man at the table in front of you has breasts like the young girl whose mother hasn’t quite accepted her need for that training bra (training to do what? you ask yourself), and they, too, are poking visible through his shirt. You gauge him to be fifty, younger than either of you two, who married a little later than your friends. He has his eye on one of two women at the table next to yours, who appears to be about twenty-five, the age of your marriage. He motions to the waiter and orders her a drink.
Your husband raises that eyebrow at you, a question. “No,” you say without being asked. “He shouldn’t.”
“Just too old?”
“Because the girls are together for a night out.” You don’t mean that they are a couple, romantically involved. They are friends who’ve come for the band. “Just watch,” you say. “He’s going to ruin their evening.”
He proceeds to do so, sitting with the young women, hearing that the desired one has a boyfriend and then moving back to his table. But the women are uncomfortable now – the tables are so closely placed that they are essentially sitting with the man – and they depart from half-eaten desserts before the band has even begun.
The band is what you’d hoped for, its rocking rhythm and blues insistently bottom-heavy, its pressing sensuality checked and then checked again. You both are, unconsciously, drumming fingers, nodding. You might be Emerson’s transparent eye, in that this eye is also an ear and every sensory organ, alive to the atmosphere around you, the current circulating in you.
You are this part and parcel of the scene until the second set when, with no malice aforethought, you are excised. The younger crowd in the bar has moved forward, is here for the music as well. The price of dinner is beyond the means of most kids in their twenties, but between the tables they squeeze, drinks in hand. All through the first set, they maintain a deferential balance, a single person sideways between each table, leaning against the back wall, careful not to block the diners’ view.
But the crowd increases relentlessly – the band is that good. The balance will not hold, they press in upon you, your view entirely blocked. A girl has her ass nearly in your face, and you must turn away from the band, your gaze upon your husband again, the girl’s ass now close to your ear, a credible sound buffer.
Neither of you speaks, but the waiter squeezes through and places the check on the table, as if this is his routine. He understands that critical mass has been reached; your evening here is over.
Your husband picks up the check and squints. He’s forgotten his glasses and can’t quite make out the totals. He holds the tab over the candlelight to better see. A black circle instantly appears on the white paper. He pulls it away from the candle before it catches fire. You both burst out laughing, are so loud that you can be heard mingling with the music, off-key and out of time. The blockade of a girl turns back to give you a dirty look.
You motion with two fingers for your husband to hand you the tab. You put on glasses and jot down the tip and total while he places a credit card in the plastic slot on the check holder.
You can’t back away from the table because of the press, but lean into it instead, put your hands on it, thinking to pull yourself up. An arm reaches over your shoulder, and a girl places her drink next to your plate. She then puts her tiny purse on the edge of the table, claiming it. You try to stand and put a hand behind you to pull your coat from the chair, but the squatter is not taking any chances, does not relinquish her position.
“You have to move so I can get my coat,” you tell her, still seated.
“I’m just putting my things here,” she says, as if this isn’t evident.
You put your elbow on the table, support your face in your hand and wait. Seeing that you are at an impasse, she takes a half step back, her ass nicely snugged in the curve of the neck of the man at the table behind you. This allows you to stand upright and pull your coat from the chair. When you take your first step away from the table, the girl nearly knocks you over as she slides into your seat.
Outside, you draw a deep breath, hoping to quell your anger, not wanting your evening to end on this note. The atmosphere is redolent with marijuana. In fact, in a crowd waiting outside the restaurant, several young people are smoking without precaution. Your husband raises an eyebrow, and you say, “Maybe since it’s legal now, cops don’t bother about the public nuisance thing.”
“Want to join them?” he jokes.
“What would be the point?” You look around, take in the utterly routine sense of the pot and the crowd when a car parked some yards down the street seizes your attention.
You hate the knowing of it, but there it is, that millisecond when you glance at the big red bow atop the Tesla, and you think “For me?” bringing instantaneous knowledge that you desire this material good, the thing that can’t be for you, that is unaffordable.
And, dammit, you discovered a box of moonlight tonight, unhoped-for beauty. You cover your mental lapse with a joke, hiding. Pointing at the bow, you say, “Someone’s going to get a blow job tonight.”
“Someone?” your husband asks and you both burst out laughing, land back in the emotional radiance of earlier that evening.
Home again, you step into the den to see a jewelry gift box atop a pink bakery box. This is why your husband claimed to have forgotten something in the house earlier this evening as you waited in the car, scrolling through meaninglessness on your phone. You know there’s no diamond ring inside. It hasn’t been so very long since you were at odds over a diamond pendant. You didn’t want it, something that someone might have died to produce. How was your milestone moment worth that? He quietly returned the gift, replacing it with the silence that followed, and you never spoke of it again.
You’re curious. His thigh touches yours as you open the smaller square. A Mobius strip of silver – silver, of course – hanging from a chain. You love this twisted cylinder, the ‘surface without a boundary,’ which you define in a way that your seventh-grade science teacher didn’t intend you to. Inscribed in diminutive letters are lines from a Rumi poem that you’d once read to him, cuddled together on a stormy evening with sky-cracking thunder. Of course, you’d read him lots of Rumi when you thought the poet belonged just to the two of you, before you realized that he was the poet of choice for all lovers, for most everyone, because most everyone didn’t know of any other poet.
The poem is “Each Note.” The inscription is from a middle stanza:
Don’t try to figure
what those lost inside love
will do next!
“Alright,” you say, promising much in your pleasure. He hooks the necklace clasp for you.
“Open,” he says tapping the pink box. Inside is a cake with a paper flag glued to a toothpick. This, too, quotes the same poem:
Life freezes if it doesn’t get a taste
of this almond cake.
You ate your strawberry dessert, all of it, but you pinch off the corner of the cake and bring the tidbit to your mouth.
“This is to die for,” you say.
“I thought so, too.” He smiles.
Victoria Waddle’s stories have appeared in Manifest West, Bosque (the Magazine), Gold Man Review, Longridge Review, and in Best Short Stories from the Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest.