Fitting Ends Read Free Page B

have lasted through the entire rendition. If, in fact, she would even have put up with some cornball singing to her on bended knee. I used to go to bars with her and her friends when I was home from college. Those girls were so funny, and so mean. I remember being surprised at how incisive these dull-looking girls could be, their intelligence hidden under heavy makeup and large, cockatoo-like hairdos, the trappings of country songstresses. They were all retail clerks, factory girls, beings we encounter sometimes in the real world but don’t really notice.
    They noticed things, though, especially my sister. She’d always had a pithy, sarcastic edge to her. There were times, in childhood, when she could stun me speechless with a single, well-aimed observation. And once she had all but destroyed my interest in a certain girl by imitating and exaggerating her small habit of briefly pinching her nose between her thumb and forefinger. The girl did this when she was being thoughtful, or when she was nervous, but my sister had made her seem so prissy and ridiculous that I had a hard time holding back my laughter when the girl and I were alone together.
    My sister’s ability seemed heightened by her audience, and I, like her friends, was enthralled by her. Her specialty was caricature, and in the time it took to drain a pitcher she might have anatomized three or four people with deadly accuracy: the fawning way her boss spoke to male customers; the mumbled innuendos of some cowboy who had ambled over to buy them a beer; the awkward, earnest dancing of an accountant who liked one of her friends.
    I can imagine what she might have done with the spectacle of my brother-in-law’s song. And she does seem to be holding back. She glances at the camera as if hoping for some ally, and a whole map of uncertainty branches through her like lightning. Just for a second.
    She’d never admit this now, of course. She would say he was “sweet.” She would give me that small-eyed, uncomprehending stare.
    â€œWhat do you know about it?” she might say. “What do you know about marriage, about being in love?” Her eyes would flicker a little, the way they did when I came in and found that she’d made my bed for me—something I never could have imagined her doing.
    I came in and she was slowly folding the bedspread over my pillow, tucking it.
    â€œI thought you’d like some clean sheets,” she said.
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    Is this a happy woman? Look at her: her face here framed against a background of yellow brick, her skin lit badly in the pale dusk, her smile held up by the constant prodding of the camera’s presence, her pace hesitantly slowed, as if she’d like to move quickly out of the picture but knows that it would be rude. She looks as if she wishes she were wearing sunglasses.
    She is married. You can see that idea occupies her, encasing her whole body with a kind of gloss, like the sheen that covers wax fruit. You can see her thinking, What have I done?
    And then the camera lifts over her head, slides up over the top of her head and over the concentric rectangles of brick like a tongue, like a cash register printing out a receipt. SANGRE DE CRISTO MOTOR LODGE says a sign on orange neon, somewhere above her. VACANCY, it announces.
    So this is it. This is the site, the focal point toward which the various rituals lead us—the billowing white gown and awkward men in tuxedos, the rice throwing and the toilet-papered and tin-can-dragging car with its JUST MARRIED sign, even the tour of beautiful, exotic sights. Everything points the way toward this climax. Here is the motel, the bare, simple room, the intimation of consummation.
    My sister was not a virgin, of course. There had been several men—perhaps more than a dozen—before my brother-in-law, and she had almost certainly been sleeping with him for some months before they even began to consider marriage. Neither