We Come to Our Senses Read Free Page B

fence, magnolia blossoms unfurled in ivory, and a dim yellow light cast down the coppery pebble inlay of the restroom wall. Darla swam to me and dipped her head back to get her hair out of her face, and for a moment we treaded the dark water and just looked at each other. She put her legs around me and we kissed as we sank, soft and slick and wet and lovely. I started to bob us off the bottom and move toward the light of the shallow end; up and down, up and down, I moved us towards that light. When the water level hit our chests, Darla told me she loved me. It felt like buckets. I wanted so badly to be with her, and knew she felt the same. But we hadn’t brought any condoms, of course, so we just half smiled and looked past each other.
    â€œWhat’s that?” she asked. She disentangled from me, then swam to the shallow end and stood up. The water was illuminated and alien there, and a cluster of small, ghost-white objects rested on the bottom of the pool. There were eight or ten of them, bulleted in shape, undulating in the current from our movements.
    â€œThey’re flower buds off of that magnolia,” Darla said. “Sepals.”
    â€œNo, babe,” I said. “They’re too white.”
    She stepped toward the blossoms, her waist rippling the water. She trapped one with her toes, reached under and pulled it up.
    â€œOh,” she said, holding the object out to me. “It’s a tampon. They’re all just blanched-out, chlorinated tampons.”
    I looked around and saw that someone had thrown the sanitary receptacle from the ladies’ room into a boxwood hedge by the lounge chairs. I guess they’d ripped it right off the wall, then dumped it out in the water as a joke.
    High schoolers, I thought. Fucking high school vandals fucking up my everything.
    THE Starbucks inside the Kroger sells the big paper from Jackson, and people leave sections lying around when heading off to work. Sometimes you pick up a Home and Garden, sometimes the Classifieds, or Religion. Sometimes those of us who don’t head off to work pass the sections around and discuss. (Nobody ever talks about art or creative process, or the city, or the things Darla and I talked about when we lived in the city. No. That life got strangled out when we moved her back home.) All week long the Metro/State section has run installments about the last abortion clinic in the state. A group of lobbyists and politicians are trying to shut it down. From predawn to dusk that clinic is hemmed by evangels wagging posters of dead babies, alongside the Jackson PD and a PBS crew.
    On my last day working at the Oriental rug shop over in Oxford, a leisure-class infant puked on the parquet floor. The mother then puppy-talked the baby while gauging a nineteenth century Persian Heriz. “Ow-noh,” she said. “Awuh-woh.” I refused to wipe up and was fired on the spot. Now Darla and I can’t afford to blast the air-conditioning.

    THE message Darla’s boss left yesterday was no longer creepy genteel. It was not Wednesday’s, Just checkin’ in on Darla to make sure she’s feelin’ okay . Nor was it Thursday’s, Hey there, just sort of wantin’ to know, well, where Darla might be. Give a call . No. It was: Darla, this is Jane Fisher. Call me the instant you get this .
    I rescued my first turtle a couple of months ago, right after I lost the rug store job. This was on a Saturday, and I remember the radio saying the temperature had hit ninety-four degrees by ten-fifteen a.m.—a record. I was coming back from dropping Darla off at Lu’s, where they were going to have a Girl’s Day Out in the country and drink Keystone Lite in Lu’s aboveground pool. The open car windows baptized me in hot air as I gunned it over the straights of County Road 313. The old Mazda shuddered with every brake at the curves. I flew past mobile homes and wood-rot barns and dead cars in yards, and millions