Stress Test Ch. 35

It drove Stephen X up the wall that his brother didn't care about things Stephen X would have traded his left nut for.

Roscoe acted embarrassed by the way his most casual remarks found a ready audience in Linda who amplified them for the benefit of mankind. Stephen X, on the other hand, took himself so seriously he didn't have a clue why the world ignored him.

Roscoe could tell you anything you wanted to know about spark plug gaps and oil viscosity, even though the subjects bored him. Kids who hadn't begun to shave could point out Stephen X's fallacies when he talked about anything mechanical.

Roscoe predicted which stocks would go through the roof based on what he read in the news and lifestyle pages. Stephen X went blind poring over market reports and still managed to lose money.

The only things Roscoe had that Stephen X apparently did not care about were the love and respect of those who knew him best. If Sandy had envied Linda anything, it would have been to have a man, a companion, worthy of those gifts.

The closer Roscoe and Linda became, the less need they had for language. Not long after they met, they began communicating in sentence fragments.

"Did you—?" Linda asked.

"Day before yesterday," Roscoe replied.

"The whole thing," Linda concluded.

Sandy felt excluded from their conversations although she knew that wasn't their intention. It was as if they had discussed every conceivable subject earlier in private. A few syllables of shorthand were all they needed to confirm their thoughts.

Their relationship gradually transcended the need for complete words.

"Uhm. Ah ha," Roscoe said, nodding.

"Mmm," Linda responded.

Finally, the tiniest flutter of an eyelid or a lift at the corner of the mouth signaled everything that needed to be told.

It was so different from Stephen X who locked Sandy in the bedroom and repeated his demands for hours until she cracked.

"Say that you love me." He knelt on her hand and pried against her nails. "Say that you love me. Say it."

He didn't always use violence to make her miserable. Sometimes he made her sit on the chair. He crossed his arms and stood between her and the door until she realized she would never leave the room until she mouthed some meaningless string of words.

"Say that you love me, God damn it."

She used to hold out, strictly on principle. But what was the point? She would be better off giving in with her fingers crossed. She could pretend she came from the planet Htrae, where everything was backwards. She could make the words drip with bile so they meant less than nothing. It didn't seem to matter.

It reminded her of Richard Kirkland and the multiplication tables. Richard was the only one who could keep up with Sandy when they studied math in elementary school. "Two times two is four. Two times three is six," he droned on until Miss Wagner waved and asked him the product of fourteen times eleven. Richard fidgeted beneath a giant multiplication sign which Miss Wagner did not yet notice had been transformed into a swastika during recess.

Richard turned red as a negative number even though he'd said the answer himself less than a minute earlier when he went past eleven times fourteen. Sandy cringed at his embarrassment and whispered, "A hundred fifty-four." But it scared her that learning the right words or numbers to say could be so important to someone who didn't understand them, who didn't know where they came from.

"Okay, I love you," she hissed once at three in the morning.

When Stephen X finally stepped out of her way, she said, "I lied. You make me sick."

His lips spread back from his gums in a horrible, mirthless grin. "I know," he said, cheating her out of even the satisfaction of telling him the truth. The next night, a week, a month later, they did it all over again.

Sometimes it seemed like the only escape she had was to go shopping with Linda. She didn't enjoy shopping, and that made her feel deficient, almost a traitor to her country. America's roots tapped into the deep, sweet waters of commerce, but she would just as soon have stayed home and ordered what she needed from a catalog. Besides, she couldn't spend more than five bucks without Stephen X's consent.

She liked Roscoe, but his presence deprived her of Linda's attention, so just the companionship of shopping made it attractive. And when she was away from it, the mall seemed at least to offer a haven from Stephen X. But shopping added up to less than the sum of its parts.

One Saturday when she was pregnant with Saury, she felt Linda's elbow prod her in front of the greeting card shop. "What's the matter, kiddo?"

"I don't know," Sandy said.

"Take the crowds . . . puh-leeze!" Linda said. "I get it. You could be the Shopping Impulse Deficiency poster child. Don't worry. They're getting close to a cure."

Sandy felt petty. "No," she said. "I like to shop with you."

"But you don't like shopping." Linda knew her too well.

"If I were by myself, I'd just get what I needed and get out of here," Sandy admitted.

Linda clicked her tongue. "Poor Sandy," she said, sweeping her arm at the masses pushing past them. "You need some remedial work. Try shopping for someone else until you get the hang of it. Look at these people—are they having fun? Of course not. It's a battleground. The more blood they shed finding the right thing to buy, the more it's worth to them.

"If you spend all day looking for something that costs two bucks, you go home happy. You've invested something a lot more important than money. You've paid the price with your sanity. That's what makes the things you buy bargains."

"You're full of shit," Sandy laughed. Linda made her feel better, and the drudge of shopping was a reasonable price to pay for that.

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Roscoe took many things with him when he died. As Sandy watched her friend's physical injuries heal after the wreck, she saw how Linda's spirits sagged. Once in a while Sandy wondered if that was how it all evened out—if the presence of a Stephen X didn't make you miserable, then the absence of a Roscoe would.

Before Linda went home from the hospital, Sandy spent an entire Saturday at Rollingwood Mall trying to find her a gift. She wandered through the department stores and specialty shops, past the food court and the arcade, looking for something to restore her friend, but unable to focus on the merchandise. Several times she turned away and then could not recall what she'd just looked at.

"Ma'am."

Sandy heard the voice and wondered who would call anyone "ma'am" these days; what kind of a person would be called "ma'am?" Then she felt the woman touch her sleeve.

"Ma'am, we're closing now. Is there anything I can help you with?"

Sandy saw a woman much older than herself watching her with concern. They stood alone in one of the big stores, where the ceiling arched fifty feet above them. Plastic torsos in bras and panties surrounded them and Sandy couldn't remember what she thought she might buy there. She looked up at a mannequin that loomed over them with outstretched arms. The mannequin's nipples stood out through the satin which covered them. Sandy felt the floor begin to roll beneath them and she broke away and ran for the parking lot.

The pain and loneliness of Linda's loss engulfed Sandy as she stood in a moth-filled cone of light next to the only car left in the lot. She imagined what it would be like to lose Saury without warning in a cataclysm; how the metal would fold and he'd be gone. How could you go on and wake up the next morning, and the next, and the next . . .

For all his blindness, Stephen X could focus on your vulnerable spots easily enough. He played on Sandy's secret fears whenever she gave the smallest, unspoken hint that she might leave him.

"You know, you'd never see Saury again. You don't make enough money at ATI to support yourself, much less him," he said calmly. "No judge in the world would give you custody. You're too unstable."

It dawned on her much later that, despite her resistance, she had been swallowing Stephen X's pronouncements as uncritically as Linda used to accept Roscoe's. It didn't matter if Stephen X's words sounded ridiculous when repeated. If they carried the tiniest shred of truth, Sandy fell for them.

What was it about the Skinners that gave their words weight? Maybe families shared more things than Sandy ever imagined.

Sandy remembered how Mama Gore used to braid her hair as they sat outside the silver Airstream. Mama Gore leaned forward and held her own long, silver ponytail alongside Sandy's shorter braid.

"Your hair will be this long some day, but I won't be here to braid it for you then," Mama Gore laughed.

Sandy pointed at a liver spot on her grandmother's hand. "Does that hurt?" she asked.

"Oh, no, sweet child. The things that hurt are never that easy to see." She pressed her cheek against Sandy's. "I was so lucky. At least I wasn't one of them. They were hard men."

"Who, grandma?"

"Gores," she said. "They were all Gores."

At that age Sandy had not yet realized what her grandmother meant about luck, about how just being related to a bad person could make you feel you were bad yourself. She was too young to see the distinction between marriage and blood.

And if the Gores passed on some gene for hardness, the Skinners shared the credibility chromosome. Roscoe used to tell about some family friend who drank himself into oblivion on New Year's Eve, wrapped his car around a telephone pole and sat through a night of sub-zero temperatures before rescue workers found him. If not for the alcohol in the man's bloodstream acting like antifreeze, Roscoe's story went, the fool would have died of exposure.

The first time she heard that, Sandy laughed. Linda arched an eyebrow and asked, "What's so funny?"

Sandy looked at the nodding heads all around her and figured she had missed something. "Nothing," she mumbled.

They still did things together after Linda recovered from the accident, but something had changed in their relationship. Although she sometimes longed to, Sandy had never been able to tell Linda about Stephen X. Now it would be harder than ever to talk about it. She would have felt guilty about the way she had squandered her chance if she confided the secrets of her monstrous marriage.

Once in awhile, Sandy even went to the mall alone, not that she ever planned to buy anything. She thought of Linda's advice to learn how to shop by finding things for someone else. Saury was changing so fast she couldn't buy anything that would hold his interest for more than a few minutes. She couldn't afford the things she wanted to lavish upon him anyway. And there was no one else to put on her list.

That's why she was looking for something for herself at Action Lady when she met Marti.

Sandy found a light jacket she liked for a hundred bucks. Stephen X wouldn't want her to spend that kind of money on anything she couldn't wear to bed. That appealed to her more than the fabric or design. She didn't need or really even want a jacket. She wanted to treat herself to the forbidden pleasure of paying too much for something. That would be a nicer gift to herself than any material thing.

She wondered whether she would tell him the price when he asked. Maybe so, if he made a crack about its ugliness. And she knew he would. Sandy stood between two racks of clothes trying to decide what to do. Maybe she should find something even more expensive. But maybe her little fling wouldn't be worth the anguish after all. Or maybe she should just touch a match to a hundred-dollar bill and send Stephen X the ashes.

A small woman with long, straight brown hair—like Jennifer used to have—brushed past Sandy and busied herself with looking at the racks. The woman—just a girl, really—tugged sleeves out of the crush of hanging clothes, but she kept glancing over her shoulder.

The girl's nervousness as she moved down the cramped aisle distracted Sandy. The two girls who had been working in the store when Sandy came in seemed to have disappeared.

The girl took an expensive leather jacket to the dressing room and Sandy turned back to her decision.

A moment later, a muscular man in jeans and a tee shirt came in from the mall.

"Lou Anne," he shouted, waiting the barest instant for response. He stormed to the dressing rooms, crouching in front of each one to see if someone hid in it. When he got to the door the girl had used, he slammed it open.

Sandy could see the girl in the new jacket pressing herself into the corner of the tiny room. The man grabbed the girl's shoulder and a handful of hair and threw her sprawling into the store. "Come out of there, you bitch," he yelled.

The girl tumbled into a display of accessories and the man lunged after her.

In one of those frantic moments where everything is clear only in the recollection, Sandy ran forward with the jacket she'd been looking at. As the man bent over the girl, Sandy came up behind him and wrapped the jacket around his head.

"Leave her alone, you bastard," she shouted, pulling hard on the sleeves. She kicked him in the small of the back just as the girl regained her balance and pushed up against his chest.

The man tumbled on his side and clawed for an opening in the jacket. Before he uncovered his face, Sandy grabbed a plastic hand covered with rings from the shelf and swung it through a giant arc which ended with a thud on the side of his head.

His body flattened out on the floor. As he began to push himself up, Sandy kicked him hard between the shoulder blades, sending his head into the tile with a loud crack.

When Sandy saw that the man would not get up, she looked around. The store's two clerks peeked out from behind the corner of the fitting rooms. The girl stood next to Sandy, struggling hard to catch her breath. They stared at each other until Sandy saw one of the clerks had slipped over to the check-out stand and was punching a number into the phone.

"We'd better get out of here," Sandy said, tugging the girl's sleeve.

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Go back to Chapter 1 of Stress Test.

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