Milk Read Free

stretch marks.” She gestures toward the area below her cinched-in belt.
    Back in the car. To my true destination: east on Huntington, farther and farther, past Rosemead, past the Santa Anita Racetrack, until I reach Arcadia Methodist Hospital, where my mother endured many hospitalizations and where she officially died, and where she was brought by ambulance that last time to be resuscitated, too late.
    Where did she draw her last breath? My father never said but I always believed it was in the hospital, the moment they brought her in on the gurney.
    As a child I thought this hospital existed on an island of sorts: Huntington Drive splits up when it reaches the hospital, one-way traffic on either side, cars rushing by, while on the grounds swayed great lonely pine trees, black and silhouetted: whenever we drove past, I knew my mother had died there and would wave.
    I’m not ready yet to go inside and request her records, not today.
    In my room at the Alta Vista, I scan the Star News that I found in the lobby. Headlines, obituaries, which lately I can’t pass up. I check them the way other people check for the winning lottery number: dead people over sixty-five, it’ll be a good day. Under fifty, a bad day. I’m nagged by why the younger ones die. Why they die so young. Heart attack, cancer, AIDS, car accident, violence, suicide—speculation on my part although occasionally there are hints, if you read between the lines.
    Nobody under seventy today, so I move on to the classifieds, for apartments or rooms to let, if I were to move here, say, instead of returning to Colorado; anyway I’ve got to get out of the Alta Vista. I can’t even go to the bathroom without tiptoeing as though I might step on something wet and slimy. Stupidly, I lost my pen somewhere so there’s nothing to circle the ads with, not to mention a phone in my room. Only a pay phone at the Alta Vista and it’s not even in the lobby. It’s outside.
    So I lie down on the bed, training my thoughts away from Jackson. At Stonewall Creek, where we live, where we lived , the rocks are red—minarets and pyramids and castles of red sandstone that loom over bluffs of prairie grass and twisted juniper.
    This is why I’m afraid to remove my wedding band. It would mean I’m not going back there.
    Eagles, snakes, coyote, mule deer, mountain lion. The Arabian horses that grazed, woolly in winter, friendly as dogs, following us on our walks. Licking our cars for the salt, rubbing their teeth against the paint. Peering in the windows of our house while Jackson and I made love.
    I should write Jackson a letter and mail it this time. Tell him the truth. Tell him about the baby. Yes, a baby. My period’s three weeks late, what else can this be? I try to see Jackson’s face as he reads the letter, the profile of his broad, unadorned features, the small stab of the mole on his clean-shaven cheek, the mole that I’ve always loved. On his face is anger. No, sorrow. He doesn’t understand me, never has. I don’t understand me; why would I leave a perfectly fine marriage?
    But it wasn’t, it hasn’t been.
    I have the moral life of a child—no, children have a better sense of right and wrong. One day it seemed a good idea to get married, like playing dress-up. A part of me has never grown up. Entire segments of me have never been exposed to light—they collapsed inside me somewhere, a black hole; no therapist has been able to dig them out. They all want to, especially when they hear those magic words about my mother committing suicide when I was seven, and the infant sister who had died earlier, when I was three, almost four. “Oh?” they’ll say, sitting up, suddenly paying attention, taking a lot of notes. It’s a weird sense of power, a case a therapist can sink his or her teeth into. I’m the safe they want to crack.
    Night-time at the phone booth just outside the front door