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April Schmidt
The skin on my palms is peeling, separating from the creases like
riverbanks sheering away from a canyon. I scrape away the whitish
peels, my palm flinching, and clear the dead, moist skin from my
fingernails. My grandmother says the same thing happened to her when
she met my grandfather.
All night I hover above sleep unable to grasp the black raven as it swoops just below, jealous in my half-waking of the stillness of Poe’s companion.
“It’s just like the recycling thing—how many times do I have to ask you what we have to do to get the milk jugs from the counter to the bin?”
“So now this is about recycling?”
“No!”
“You just can’t let go of anything, can you, April? The recycling?”
“It’s an example, Häns—an example! Every time we try to talk about something you get hung up on the details—”
“I get hung up on the details?”
“Will you let me finish?”
“‘Every time I get hung up on the details.’”
“It’s like you’re incapable of seeing past the examples—”
“Then maybe you should just tell me what the issue is.”
“What the issue is? You’ve got to be kidding me—you know what the issue is.”
“Enlighten me.”
“Whatever you leave undone needs to be finished. While you walk around telling me to relax—to stop worrying about everything—to just 'trust God that things will turn out'—I’m the one running around picking up the pieces!”
The bathroom is black and hard. I sit on the floor with the bones of my spine against the door. The sides of my eyeballs are numb, like black has been injected there. A waxy dim coats the window.
This year is not the first for anything. Not the first year married, not the first year in the house, or the job, or finished with school. It’s an old t-shirt pulled from the dryer; comfortable, but only because I’ve been in it before, and worn to tearing.
“You treat me like a child, April—like I’m someone to be controlled and disciplined, like I’m just this bomb of irresponsibility waiting to destroy your perfect, organized world. You respond to me like I’m a two-year-old.”
He’s sitting on the edge of the loveseat after pacing the room, his body like a raccoon’s, uncertain of offensive or defensive, capable of damage, incapable of guile.
The sun is setting on our anger. It’s orange and hovering. Wan and weak. I’m standing at the edge of the room, staring at the pictures on the wall, only acknowledging him from the corner of my eye. The stripes from the blinds lay across my body and over the carpet.
A thin green cloud seeps over my shoulder and down across the stripes. I open my mouth:
“Well?”
He hates my planning. Because it eliminates him.
I hate his dreaming. Because it requires me.
Three envelopes in the mail today. Bill. Bill. White security paper lined with black spittle, like the inside is covered with ants. Plastic window on the front, thin, black and blue logo in the corner. Bounced check.
“I was thinking maybe we could go to church in the morning.”
“Go ahead if you want,” I say, daring him to choose God over me. Daring him to make something more important than our problems.
He sets the alarm for the service, the clean creases of his knuckles strong in the lamplight. “You can decide in the morning if you want to come.”
He hits snooze for an hour, his fingers flopping toward the button. I lay awake looking
at the ceiling.
Thanksgiving: working. I sit and talk with a homeless man between taking pictures of the celebrity volunteers. He, tired and dignified, says: Every morning when I wake up, I start thanking God for everything I touch. With my eyes closed I thank him for the bed I’m sleeping in. Then I open my eyes and thank him for my sight. When I stand, I thank him for my legs. At the sink, I thank him for my toothbrush, for warm water, for this stocking cap I put on. That’s how I keep going.
I can tell this is true because he speaks not like a manicured housewife about her Zantac but like a diabetic about his insulin. Because this has nothing to do with quality of life, it has to do with surviving.
He asks me if I’m going to try to take his picture for a brochure and when I get to leave to have dinner with my family.
Mom calls today, just to check in. They had babies by this point in their marriage. Bigger things to think about. Distractions. And at least enough sex to make three babies.
“I just don’t understand. It’s like my switch won’t trip—like now I suddenly have a switch and I don’t know where it is.”
We’re sitting in the car in the dark. For once I’m in the driver’s seat. We’re both facing forward. He’s been in the studio for 18 hours. I’ll take him back again in 5 and he won’t come home at all tomorrow night.
“I always thought our physical life would be my safe place—my free place—one place where I wasn’t even capable of planning or worrying or measuring. Because it used to be.”
He lets the silence sit while we both add words: Used to be with . . .
“I just don’t understand what’s different now, now that there’s no reason to resist. I refuse to believe that the ‘forbidden fruit’ thing is the whole answer—that the only reason I could be magnetized before was because sex was off limits. Even if that was it, all the guilt I tortured myself with about ‘going too far’ would have been more than enough to defuse it. I just don’t know what’s changed.”
As soon as I say it, an answer precipitates from the saturated air. The seed locks and the dark crystal stacks layers, sucking in all the floating grains of guilt and question and exhaustion, racing out like ice binding up a black window: He’s the difference, he’s the problem.
I don’t mean it, I don’t believe it, but we freeze in the crystal, one more ringing guess to try and thaw.
Driving home tonight, after an evening with old friends back from Alaska, Colorado, nearly all the lights were green. Even with all the people in the city the streets were open and the intersections empty. Van Morrison on the radio. I looked at the stars through the top curve of the windshield between flashes from the passing streetlights.
The last stop light red, I pulled into the driveway just as the next song ended in “home…where I want to be. Home . . . where I want to be.”
Walking inside, locking the door, I found Häns asleep sitting on the couch under the light of two lamps. I said his name and touched his knee, still in my coat and shoes, and he blinked and asked me how he got there.
I don’t know, baby, how did we get here?
Read about Ophelia today. And Dido. Fathers, gods, and lovers strategizing. Two women, broken, dead, the calculations’ mere remainder. I’m starting to think of the timelessness of literature in a different way. And what it means to believe love and possession share a dimension.
“Maybe tomorrow we could maybe try to spend a little time together?”
My hands are full of shampoo, he puts one hand on my back and rubs my shoulder with the other, looking in my eyes. His shoulder gets dappled with the beads of warm water and they slide down his landscaped arm. His body feels warm and stable; I feel a glimmer.
“Yeah, that would be nice,” I say, looking him back in the eyes. “I miss you.”
I mean it.
Dear God, whatever it takes—romance, wine, goofiness, time, distraction, rushing, faking, hoping, ignoring, dressing, dancing, reading, insomnia, weariness, rain, wind, sun, moon—whatever it takes—make it happen. Please, make it happen. Whatever it takes.
Everything is wrong. Mint makes his mouth cold. Blankets make me too warm. I’m tense. He fumbles. There’s a way to end it. It means giving up on something. I swallow hard.
And Daphne. Pursued against her wishes. Chased by a god. Saved by a god. What if you want to be rescued without running? And if you’re left with only one God, unsure which he might be?
After work today I get home, pull the emergency brake, and realize that I don’t remember the drive. Not a sound, not an image.
Betsy and I sit in Heidi’s living room planted in a secondhand sectional. Heidi clomps in from the kitchen in the enormous wedge sandals she wears to reach 5 feet and clacks a bowl of salsa on the table. She raises her hand like a grade-schooler. Betsy and I stop our conversation and nod at her.
“Sorry. But, do you like my new haircut?” She takes out her barrettes and shakes her blonde layers down over the shoulders of her Ralph Lauren peasant shirt.
“Very cute.”
“Okay—go on.” She plops down next to Betsy’s waify, composed frame. “So, things are good?”
Betsy leans her slight shoulders forward and pinches a chip. She breaks off a corner and nods. For all her modesty, she’s practically fluttering. She and Brian are newlyweds.
“Sometimes I’m not really as interested as he is, but I know it’s important to be selfless,” she pops off another corner of the chip, “You know, to be a good wife to him.”
“So you’re his sex slave,” Heidi jokes.
“Heidi!” Betsy blushes. “No! But you know what I mean, it’s biblical: the whole ‘The wife’s body does not belong to her alone, but also to her husband’ thing.”
“And—” Heidi interjects, munching a tomato drenched chip, “you get to jump him whenever you want, too.”
Betsy smiles and shakes her head, “I think it’s really more an issue for me, to recognize his needs and how they’re more important.” She chews the chip corner. “And, I always end up feeling good about it in the end.”
Heidi reaches for another scoop of salsa and teases, “So basically, you like being a sex slave.”
I sit on the tattered fabric and watch them giggle.
We try again. After, I smile and turn over to fall asleep. When I hear his breathing settle, I creep through the dark to the bathroom and sob.
There’s a small spider in the corner of the bathroom floor. She’s slender and industrious, her thin legs step across her web, polishing and fastening. The web is empty, nothing caught to struggle or die, nothing grotesque. She’s simply housekeeping. As she is, her satisfaction costs nothing. I watch her weaving in the dusty corner over the dull grey linoleum. Even I, in all my spitefulness, couldn’t bring myself to crush her. There’d be no reason for it.
Sex is supposed to be a symbol for the union of Christ with the church, the mystical intermingling, the binding spirit. God, chancing ruin, risking metaphor across worlds.
We’re talking around the d-words. Depression. Divorce. Both of them.
“I have rearranged myself around you—let go, loosened up—given up my preferences for predictability, solitude, control. And some of it has been good—real growth. But I am tired of bending my entire self, I’m tired of it, Häns.”
“Well, I’m sorry that you’ve had to change your life while I’ve sat here doing nothing.”
The whole room darkens. The aperture in my eyes closes down: click. click. But nothing gets sharper, only darker.
“never mind”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
I slide on my shoes and pivot toward the door. Everything moves slowly. “This isn’t working Häns.” The keys spill over the edge of the counter and clatter on the end of the chain.
“Where are you going? April, where are you going?”
“I don’t know.” I click the door shut behind me.
I drive. Sit in parking lots. Finally crawl in the backseat and lay with the seatbelt buckles stabbing into my kidneys. Afraid of being found, afraid of being raped. The car gets hot, so hot, and the sky stays dark.
Betsy calls me at Heidi’s. She’s heard I’m there for dinner, probably staying the night. I know they’ve talked before I get the phone. Heidi says, “Stay as long as you need to.” Betsy says, “I just don’t think it’s right.”
“Please come home.”
“I’m just not ready.”
Back home I ask Häns to move his hunting rifle or its ammunition. To put it somewhere I can’t find it.
Today I saw it in another closet. Not even covered. The clip and shells where they’ve always been.
Häns and I see a counselor. She decides that I have generalized anxiety and he has attention deficit disorder. We spend most the time trying to convince her that we have a valid issue, that it’s not just archaic Judeo-Christian fundamentalist guilt-based repression.
He is kissing. His eyes are closed, his forehead smooth, his neck tilted back for mine tilted forward. His hair is always darker in the winter. He breathes in my ear and kisses my neck. His hand plants on my chest. I curve my shoulder to move away. He drops his hand and keeps kissing, his eyes closed, his lips trying to push forward.
I sidle out of the nook of the couch, out from under his body and stand for a minute in the murky five o’clock light. We don’t look at each other. I walk to the bathroom and lock the door.
Sit and stare at the tub.
The floor creaks outside.
“April, what are you doing?”
“What are you doing?”
“Crying! Just crying.”
The house is silent.
“Baby, please come out. I can help you to bed. I’ll sleep on the couch.”
I stare at the tub.
I stare at the tub.
Blood. Chemicals. He’d have insurance money—a fitting memorial to my tendency to sacrifice for the sake of the future. He could finish school. Could find someone else, better. Knives in the kitchen, quiet. My mom, sisters. Pain. Botching it. Could go quiet to the kitchen.
I wait for him to fall asleep. Stare into the dark.
At four I wake in the watery grey. Turn the handle to leave the bathroom. He’s spread on the floor in front of the door, sleeping. His presence holding me in.
This is Your fault. Your fault.
My palms are peeling again: my grandparents’ legacy. The ones who got divorced because of an affair. But it’s cold enough I don’t flinch scraping the dead off anymore. I don’t really feel it.
On the drive to the university today the trees are bare and the snow is old. It’s the week before Christmas and the glisten and
shimmer has been stirred into a sandy corpse decomposing by the side of the roads. There’s no stillness, no wind, and no definition in the sky. The bump of the railroad tracks is hardly jarring.
Into the dirty canvas of my days fall dark drops of heavy red, rusty, old, both fresh from cuts and partially coagulated. When I begin to think color no longer exists, we fight, and the fabric of marriage shows black and white except for, from persimmon to vermillion, all shades of hurt. I can no longer even Technicolor the days, fake as that was.
Graduate Design Studio 1 is presenting today to close the semester and I’ve come to celebrate the pinnacle at the established graduate school bar. Häns greets me outside. He’s wearing green cargo pants with a bleached spot on the knee and a baggy yellow t-shirt. He’s unshaven and his hair hasn’t been cut for four months, the result equally of lack of time and lack of money. He holds open the door, says quietly he’s glad I came. I know he’s wearing cologne, but I’m used to it and never smell it anymore. We’re both relieved to be in public, excused momentarily from the exhaustion of our problems.
The Kitty Cat is the kind of lounge that no one would visit if it was ever fully lit. The couches, upholstered in deeply textured, mismatched fabric, are clumped next to snake plants and spare ficus trees. The brick in the walls is exposed, and kitschy, light-up stars swoop around, dangling from the ceiling fans. The place smells a little dusty and the bartenders sport piercings and tattoos. The small stage, lit in red, hosts acoustic singer-songwriters and a few jazz trios. If you look at anything too long you begin to notice that the place is not just antique, it’s dirty. As precisely as they dress, architects fancy themselves artists rather than technicians and the artistic-by-association vibe seems to be what draws them here. That, and the two-for-one wine and imported beers for happy hour.
Häns offers to buy me a drink, a generous and constant sacrifice in our financial reality: a drink for me means none for him. I’m thirsty for water, a typical and diplomatic response in our conversational navigation: a drink for me means none for him.
“Really, go ahead babe—it’s your last day of studio. I really am feeling dehydrated.”
He sees there’s heart in my reply, not just will, and heads to the bar to order. He’s tired, I can see it in the way he walks, his muscular arms bent, palm enfolding knuckles. At his most transparent moments he has a childlikeness about him, a wide-eyed, open-handed unassumption. It may be because his cheeks are a little round, but I think instead it’s the way he considers things with absolute simplicity. To my husband, handing over money is no cause for regret and relationships do not involve tallies. He’s the kind of man that makes me think ‘sophisticated’ shouldn’t be an adjective I desire so much. Watching him take a bottle in each hand and promptly give one to a classmate who had trouble making rent this month, I love him. It knocks a crack into my frozen cave. He’s exactly the kind of man I want as a father to my children.
“Bonjour mademoiselle, comment allez-vous?” François saunters up and drapes his arm around my shoulders.
“Madame. Madame,” I say smiling. I’ve been acting for family and friends long enough that cocktail pleasantness is no challenge. “Careful there.” I tense my shoulders to keep the contact light. I know enough about François to know that he doesn’t always think about implications. Häns shoots me a sympathetic smile—that darn François—and goes back to his conversation. Jealousy is one of the few issues we’ve never had. But I worry about appearing too open to the eyes of all the others; studios are petri dishes for gossip. To contextualize François’ faux pas out of dangerous territory, I turn to wit.
“A Frenchman whose vocabulary is worse than a non-French speaking American girl? François, I took three weeks of French in third grade summer school—even I know that one.”
He smiles and shows his rounded white teeth. His open demeanor makes propriety a requirement of mine not his. His amaretto clinks in his other hand and I notice he’s wearing my favorite cologne. The smell is close and warm. I feel myself relax a little and, after being cold all day, suddenly notice his arm is warm resting over my nearly bare shoulders. I’m usually so far from my body Häns has to rub my back for an hour before I remember I have skin. But I’m tired of being watchful, of having problems to solve. Our physical struggles make it necessary and pointless to be attentive to the meaning and implication of everything. For once, it’s nice to have a feeling without a strategy.
I continue the conversation: “So, have you heard from the girl yet?”
François’ dark eyebrows raise over his high cheekbones. He has a bright face, childlike in its own way, inquisitive and happy. This is a man for whom life has been relatively easy, for whom resources are never in question. Someone with confidence.
I prompt him: “The girl? From the party?” Still under his arm, I’m beginning to feel the warmth down my shoulders and across my chest. A clasp deep inside my ribs clicks open and my joints begin to feel lithe. I breathe the amber light we’re in and open to the room.
“No!” He frowns. “Letmetellyouwhathappened—” his arm lifts from my shoulder and pauses in a storytelling gesture. The rest of the architecture crowd has finished getting their drinks and circled in two groups. François and I stand by the stage next to a pool of red light. “So . . . Saturday I went out to a party and she was there—but,” He shifts his shoulders to the other side, “her friend was there too. And . . . I kind of dated her friend for awhile—”
“François!” I play the expected role. Out from under his arm, the space feels colder.
“I know . . .” François’ chin lowers like a chastised puppy and he gives an apologetic smile. His hair is a European sort of brown, darker than brunette without being black. It’s tactile, wavy and thick. I can feel it in the space between my fingers.
I realize I’m standing closer to him than I need to and glance around. Every one else is engaged in their conversations, drinks in hands, ankles on knees. Häns is part of a quartet whose laughing punctuates the typical bartending din and conversational hum. François and I sit on the edge of the stage to continue our conversation. The boards of the stage are orange in the red light and the rest of the bar seems dark in comparison. Separated and on a stage, I smell François’ cologne again and begin to feel like, here in front of everyone, I’m getting away with something.
“Frank, are you a good guy?” I break my roles and speak directly. This is a high stakes gamble. Whatever sea I’m beginning to feel lapping at my body, I know his answer could be a lifebuoy or an anchor. “Or are you just out to have a good time?”
His face gets serious and his brown eyes stare into his glass. This is a good sign—a bad sign.
“No, I’m a good guy.” An unusual pause. “I actually end up getting walked on in a lot of relationships.” I can see this. His energy is easily directed and he’s eager to please. Materially, he’s had no reason in life to learn to be selfish, maybe this crosses over.
The conversation has also crossed over and I’ve lost my gamble. I know because I feel like I’ve won.
“So, what kind of girl are you really looking for then?” He’ll throw out some features and my lifelong insecurities will evaporate the rising amber. First he’ll say tall, then blonde; he’ll say something that will simultaneously discredit him in my eyes and me in his.
He looks into my eyes as he speaks, shoulders relaxed as he leans back onto his arm. “She has to be ambitious—you know, want to do something with her life. My last girlfriend wasn’t interested in traveling. She wore a lot of sweatpants—which is fine for hanging around and stuff, but we’d plan to go out for dinner and I’d show up dressed . . .” he gestures at his soft white button-down and crisp black pants.
“—Nice. Classy—” I submit.
“And, she wasn’t interested in learning my language.”
I shake my head. “It’s hard if someone you care about isn’t interested in working to learn your language.” Responsible, trustworthy. In float words from my bilingual marriage—words that are native to me but seem so foreign to Häns. They suddenly marshal in phrases I don’t believe in, seeds that have been thought but, miraculously, haven’t germinated: just outgrew it, incompatible. “Or if they just can’t.”
François sips his drink and nods. When he sets it back down I get another wave of his warm smell. Another thought strikes him and as he begins to speak, his fingers touch my arm in a casual, unthought gesture. Looking at him, my body is warm and comfortable, relaxed. I feel intelligent and confident. A starving part of me feels fed. He really does have beautiful eyes.
For the rest of the night I glance over at Häns, keeping track of where he bounces in conversation, telling myself my looks are measures for his well-being not my self-protection, feeling for the first time in months that I have a self to protect.
The next morning while Häns and I shower together I blabber about the party we’re going to in the evening, how glad I am it’s Friday, how I’m really in the mood to get out a little and have some fun for once.
Häns chuckles at this unusual morning burst while he dries his hair. “You’re in a good mood.”
“Well, aren’t you excited to get out some? To celebrate being done? What do you think I should wear? Will people be dressed up or casual?” I swing my navy bathrobe around my shoulders. “I want to look good for you.” I smile at him.
“Just wear that.” He pulls on a pair of boxers.
“My bathrobe?” I tie the robe sash.
“What’s underneath,” he says, buttoning his jeans and popping his spiky hair through a black t-shirt with a smirk.
“I’m guessing I’d be underdressed.” I smirk back, rubbing my towel through my hair.
“You’d be the best dressed chicken there,” he says, using my quirky nickname from a Kurt Vonnegut novel. He smiles and leaves the bathroom to make our coffee. I pick a fitted top with a draped neckline, black pants, and sassy boots. Nice. Classy.
Back in the bathroom I pull my makeup bag down from the top shelf. The espresso machine in the kitchen, a luxury leftover from the days before Häns went back to school, squeals as he steams milk for lattés. I adjust the neck of my shirt, conscious of my breasts for the first time in days, and think, I’m dressing for a man who’s not my husband. I’m so relieved to be excited about something that I let the tingle thrill my skin.
A glass of wine. Red. Ruby. Swirl. Sip. I can smell my own perfume. Red. Jasmine. Succulent. Sitting on the couch, legs crossed. Leaning over. “So, do you think of yourself as French or American?” Both really. “Favorite place you’ve lived?” Great house in Belgium. Took these vacations to the coast of Italy. Thrum: bass kicks the roots of my breath. Blows. Swells into the floor of my throat. Billie Holiday in remix, the music slinks like spirit, the treble skitters like static over spreading cirrus “. . . that lipstick . . . hush now, don’t explain. . . .” The middle reels, like a round lock racing, slipping. Sip. Warm oak. Black pepper. “Häns—sorry to interrupt—you’re going downstairs? Great. I’ll come in a bit.” Smooth wood floors, voices, scarves over the lamps. Candles burning somewhere. He’s close with his family. “And architecture?” More interested in development, really. A business man. Different cologne tonight. Sip. Say ‘merlot.’ The mouth moves like a kiss. People from the other end of the couch come and go, we stay. I didn’t tell him to sit here, did I? Legs touching. Me: leaning over, wine glass in the left; talk, gesture; right hand (writing hand): fingertips touch his arm. Relaxed muscle under. Thrum: Holiday croons, “lipstick . . . don’t explain.”
More wine, madam? “Thank you, yes.” I feel like I’m in a Rothko painting. A red one. Where it’s warm. What if this were my life? A painting to make love in. Jessica joins our conversation. She’s with Mike, with him. François jokes about stealing, luring. He’s not serious. One arm around each of us. Sip. Is he? He leaves for a blonde. Left, we joke: always has to meet the new girl. We share our disdain for the ones who giggle: Speak French, Speak French. Like it’s some kind of cabaret.
Häns comes, smiling. He finally feels like the semester is done. More wine for my baby? “Sure—the merlot. Be right back, I’m going to run to the bathroom.” Kiss on the cheek. Step, step, step-step. My eyes in the mirror looking in my eyes. Blink, focus. You know what you’re doing, don’t you? You know what you’re doing, don’t you.
Dark. Empty green wine bottles, a cluster, on the dining room table. Music. Heartbeat. François. Thrum: lock reels. Hips pulled in. Häns talking elsewhere. Top beat trips, treble orbits. Spin with the room. Hand in his hand. Hand on my back, palm, violin fingertips, press. Close. Palm on his arm, clutch, spin. His muscles beneath my fingers taut, loose. Spin. Hold. Hips locked. Breathe. Sweat. Drop. Chest open. Neck arched. Fall. Catch, his hot hand open, arm cradle. Sweeping. Up. The heat from his chest on my breast. Thrum. The smell of his skin, tan. The space between hot, humming. Red. Inside, the deep strokes of red on grey. Slow. To. Sway. Fingers guide, wrapped into. My side, encircled. Held. My fingers stretch in his hand, feel it. He smiles, brown eyes open. Floor turns. Axis between. Force pushes, he pulls. Faster. Force pushes, he pulls, tension locks. Solid. Rushing, resistance makes the solid thing. Spin flies open, fall back, sweating. Laughing.
2 am. Drunk, warm, happy. If I was here alone. Whose home? Party mellows. Häns happy to see me happy: We better go babe . . . morning. . . . Smiling at him, limbs loose: “But I don’t want to go.” Häns happy I’m happy, with his friends. François scoops me up, easy fit, carries me to Häns. Smile: Votre épouse, monsieur. Häns, smile: Merci. Trois. They are taking care of me. Touch and dance: carry home. I’m the conjunction. “But, I don’t want to go.” I don’t want to go. Home.
For a month after the party, Häns and I have spectacular sex. He doesn’t ask any questions. I shut my questions in a small room in my mind. Lock the door and turn away, listening only to their whirling and slamming against the walls. One slips out through the keyhole: I wonder about the risks God is willing to take, about the haunting of a tattered old prayer.
April Schmidt teaches writing at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. She received an MFA from Hamline University and lives in Minneapolis with her husband and son in the company of a sixty-year-old maple tree.
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