Michael Thériault

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Her Delight


“I need just about a third of the rod,” Mark said, standing with her before the open closet. “The rest is yours.”

Yolanda pictured the longer closet rod in her current apartment out in San Ramon. Even if she took Mark’s third, this one would not quite hold its contents.

They had searched the City weeks for an apartment they could afford, in the neighborhood where they had first met one evening when she had gone drinking with friends after work, and where young women and men like themselves fed the restaurants, cafés, and bars. This apartment, with its one large, bright, high-ceilinged room and its shining small kitchen, in a well-kept century-old building, was the one they had found that was not a misery.

“That could work,” she said now at the closet door.

The sunlight through the room’s bay window sparked reds in Mark’s tousle of dark hair and trim dark beard. She had toyed with the beard often, trailed her fingers across it or tugged it to distract him when he was laboring at some task on his laptop, then laughed at his complaints. More often than not she enjoyed it when he brushed it across her skin.

“We have the truck for a day,” he said. “One day should do if we start early. I figure one trip for my stuff, one for yours, one for the dump. James is on board for the whole day. Berto from our warehouse can come if we need him.”

Nothing in Mark’s frame, slender and no taller than hers, suggested capacity for heavy lifting. Yolanda gauged that they would call Berto early.

Mark’s few possessions didn’t fill his room in the house he shared with friends. He was surrendering the room to James, who would move in as soon as Mark vacated; even rooms to rent were scarce. Yolanda’s suburban apartment was bigger than this one, but Mark wanted to stay in the City, and she had acceded to the attractions of the neighborhood and its young residents. Almost all the items in the run to the dump, however, would be hers.

She most regretted having given up her car and the freedom of movement it bestowed. It was old. Its starter was balky. The dipstick needed frequent attention. The air conditioning was intermittent. She had named the car, though: Ethel. The apartment had no garage. Some were nearby, but at stiff rents. She could meet most of her wants within a ten-minute walk from her new front door. Her nursing station at the university medical center would be a much shorter commute by trolleybus than it had been by freeway, bridge, and street from across the Bay. She’d sold the car for a good price at its age, but not nearly enough to cover the apartment’s deposit.

The move would be – if not quite permanent, and even without marriage – difficult to undo. Her parents were not a fallback; they’d moved out of state after retirement. He’d left his in Kentucky.

Between them, they earned enough for the apartment and a couple of nights out each week. Yolanda was secure in her nursing job and loved it. To each patient on her floor was assigned a list of diagnoses and procedures, categories of the defined and predictable. Almost all patients presented challenges unanticipated in these categories. It was as though their human persons, through no consideration of their own, declined to be understood as things. Or maybe it was that things were all this way, each in its degree, each containing a germ of the wild. Whatever the case, the days went quickly and left her hungry for small pleasures.

Mark tended computer systems and plant software for a small manufacturer just south of the City. A flat tire on his commute bicycle or a plant emergency had at times left her waiting alone at some bar or café past their scheduled meeting time. This had always meant a compensatory gift. Flowers were clichéd, but she accepted them. Better were the quirky toys he found somehow, the windup backward-swimming crayfish, the troll-like tiny doll that growled what sounded like obscenities in what sounded like Japanese, the little autonomic police Ford that chased a little autonomic Dodge across her carpet. Once when he was particularly late she had marched him to a shoe store and – a glimpse of the fear in his hazel eyes as she turned shoes over and revealed prices had delighted her for days – he had paid for her choice; the tan soles months later were still unmarked.

The move gave her no hesitation.

She watched him at breakfast when he stayed over, his hair even more tousled from the sheets, his eyes large in his slender face, and she felt she would not soon tire of this with her coffee.

She lay her head against the deep pulse of his chest and its small center patch of hair and found sleep in its smell – as of what? – as of (she imagined) a small mammal emergent from damp fallen leaves.

She brushed fingernails across his nipples in the dark and elicited small unconscious moans.

“I need,” she said to him at the closet door, “to get back to packing.”

*

Mark stood just below a stair landing between the second and third floors, one flight down from her apartment and the top of the stairs, from which she watched. James stood just above the landing. Between them her dresser, tall and wide, blocked the landing diagonally and seemed incapable either of descending or of returning up the way it had come.

One of her neighbors, going out, had already turned back and exited the building by the narrower back stairs and the patio and garage.

A vertical oblong of sweat half-obliterated the cartoon character on the chest of Mark’s T-shirt as he held his cell phone to his ear. James was no bigger than him, but the two of them had carried the dresser readily enough, if with some chuffing and muttering. They had been down the hallway and then down the first flight of stairs when the broader top of the dresser had stopped just shy of gouging the wall, and the oak veneer of the dresser’s face in peril of being scratched by the steel wall rail.

She tried to but couldn’t remember just how the movers had made the corner when she had watched them deliver it. The man on the downstairs end had given a few terse instructions – “Back toward me,” “Your left a little,” and the like – and up they had gone. As he and his partner were peeling away the plastic that had wrapped its drawers shut and positioning it against her bedroom wall, he had winked at her and said, “You got to be smarter than the load.”

Berto took nearly an hour to arrive from his home in the City. Mark and James leaned against the guardrail on the inside turn of the landing, toward the open center of the stairwell and away from the wall, and chatted around the dresser, their words just beyond her hearing. Sometimes they laughed, also quietly. She walked away from their quiet to the kitchen, where she wrapped in newspaper the dishes from breakfast and finished filling a box. When she returned to the stairs Mark and James glanced at her. Then James turned his face back to Mark and the coarse-straw tuft of hair atop his head to her, and the two continued their private chat. She went to pack bedding.

She came back out when she heard Berto. He was short, with a belly that overhung his belt. From the gray in the stubble that he had not shaved this Saturday and from the thinning of his dark hair she put his age at about fifty. The three men had brought the dresser back up the stairs and were turning it end-around at a wide spot in the hallway. Then they went back down. With the projection of the dresser top moved away from the wall and into the open space above the guardrail, they made the turn at the landing and were soon at the rented box truck.

Yolanda arrived at its back with a box as they finished positioning the dresser in it.

“That’s how you do it,” she heard Berto say.

Berto’s hands and orders sped the rest of the loading. He took James in his pickup across the bridge to the new apartment. Mark drove the rented truck. Yolanda rode beside him.

In the wait at the bridge’s toll plaza he turned to her, his mouth open and eyebrows raised, an expression as cartoonish – she thought, and was tickled – as the figure on his T-shirt.

“We’re doing this,” he said.

“We are,” said Yolanda.

“No turning back,” he said.

“Locked on,” said Yolanda.

He turned back toward the bridge and the City and let out a whoop.

Watching him, Yolanda found something in her delight she couldn’t quite decipher, a shiver at its edge, aside, barely in view.

*

Stretching out a tape measure here and there, Berto went up and down the three stories to the apartment. Then he came to the back of the truck, where Mark, Yolanda, and James waited, and said simply, “Okay.” With Mark and James again following Berto’s grunted commands, they were done in less than two hours, the furniture reassembled and in place, the boxes waiting to be unpacked. Yolanda felt an unexpected kinship with the little man with his belly and thinning hair and a gratitude toward him beyond what she owed for his help. He moved with grace and assurance amid things, in their simultaneous solidity and unpredictability, as she felt on her best days she moved among the patients on her floor.

“Better hustle to make the dump before it closes,” he said; and to Yolanda, “You want to come along in case you forgot anything from the old place?”

She shook her head. “I’m all done with it. I’ll stay and unpack.”

The men left.

Laughing at herself, Yolanda made the bed first.

She filled the bathroom and kitchen cabinets and set out towels. Finding a box of mints, and laughing again, she put one on the pillow that would be Mark’s.

Then she turned to the dresser. When its drawers, too, were full, she ran a hand along its corners and edges, stood back, and examined it. Nothing was nicked, nothing scratched.

She decided to have Mark ask Berto if he drank, and, if so, what he preferred, and she would get him a bottle, or maybe a gift card for a dinner for him and his wife. Berto had taken charge; he had shown the way. She looked forward, she did, to years with Mark, but he would require some … guidance.

She came to the closet. She set up her ironing board and, working quickly, soon filled her two-thirds of the rod. Her boxes held more.

She was about to close the closet door, but stopped.

She laughed with a fullness that surprised her. Yes, they were locked on, no, there would be no turning back for either of them; and now she knew her way, and what she had found indecipherable earlier.

She returned to her boxes and the ironing board and, her laughter diminishing, her delight growing ever more serious as it brimmed over, she filled the rest of the rod.

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Banner Art:
from Interior with Mirrored Closet, Roy Lichtenstein, 1991