Parlor Trick

I don’t remember the first time, but I learned early on in our time together how to look at Anne and see her as when we had first met, when we were complete, nameless strangers. The experience, as I recounted to Father Reynolds after one of our gin-primed debates over welfare (used deftly I think by me to steer the subject away from gay marriage) and once in a duck blind off the coast of Ocracoke, is similar to staring at the repetitive patterns of a fence or ornate wall until the wires or pickets or stones and mortar and their collective dimensions dissipate and everything appear to be floating in space right before your very eyes. The sensation lasts only a brief moment, and then when you reach out to touch it, it disappears and everything falls back again into its prescribed realm. In this manner of seeing, I could, for the first few years of marriage, if only for a second or two, remember Anne the way she was before I knew her, the way other people perhaps see her now, with her existence still pure, unmingled, uncrossed with mine.

I try this parlor trick now, with her resting under the shade of the glossy pines with her bottom on the hood of the wagon, worrying over the sunscreen, but I cannot pull it off. Even after squinting and crossing my eyes until they hurt, she is still who she is: a realtor, my wife of seventeen years (fiancée for two, girlfriend for one), and mother of two (and this is mutually agreed-upon) exceptional teenagers.

“What are you doing?” she says.

“Trying to remember where I saw it last.”

“Oh well,” she says.

She makes a sound like the air letting out of a balloon, and then makes a face, scrunching up her lips and her chin and furrowing her brow. Even still, she is too pretty: Looking at her, I feel a deep, nervous tension in the pit of my stomach and the tips of my fingers begin to tingle. I wonder if she looks at me this same way ever and if she did what would she see? Paul Erickson, ex-engineer, Darden graduate, sales manager for a Fortune 500 technology company, quickly closing in on forty, bluegrass and microbrews on the weekend, father of two (as previously agreed-upon) exceptional teenagers? Or the person I was before I crossed her path? A man essentially without purpose or form?

Anne pulls out of her leather tote two women’s sun hats and two baseball caps with ear and neck flaps. Anne puts her broad-brimmed straw hat on and hands Kate hers. She hands me the ball caps with a look of assignation. (I plan to stall the act as long as I can to avoid the confrontation with Thomas and the stream of protests which is sure to follow).

Kate thwaps her loafers down onto the pavement, puts her hair up into a knot, and folds the knot up into her hat. She slides her toes into her shoes and then crushes the backs of the loafers with her heels until the shoes are like flats. Somewhere a gnarled, old cobbler is crying.

Before I can remark, Kate takes off her sunglasses and says, “I think I saw Pepper.”