At This Distance

At this Distance

There’s something methodical about you. I watch the way you parallel park the red truck with an eighteen-foot boat attached. You move back and forth across the dirt with perfection alongside a mammoth Ponderosa Pine. Keeping my distance, I watch you inch forward one more time, and then straighten the wheel. Too impatient for this process, I wait outside the truck.

However, as many times as I’ve seen this from the outside, it won’t grow tired to me. I admire your quiet patience and your large tan hands and how they can grip the steering wheel with such trained accuracy. You’re a captain at his helm. With my arms crossed at my chest I can sense that my face looks angry, for no reason. I will admit, a sweet admiration is beginning to wash over me. Maybe this is my soft side? Maybe this is what I must tell myself because I’m not sure how long this relationship is really going to last, and I should just be happy. I’m already flashing back to you parking and they way you had glanced at me from beneath the bill of your baseball cap. And even with this distance, I know your eyes have already deepened into an indigo blue, the way the sky becomes saturated as it begins to fold itself into evening. Even at this distance, I know your eyelashes have already begun to curl from a day of swimming and sweating on the lake. And now, I’m wondering what you see when you look at me, how I must appear through the windshield: A girl standing in a white skirt and flip-flops, and her hair a lake-tangled mess. I can almost taste the salt on your skin. This is part of our silence.

As the years passed, we learned we don’t always have to speak to one another. We’ve learned to make love and fight—all in a single glance. Right now, I see you under the light of the man that you are: Strong and focused, even with the contradictions you live with, your silent dilemmas, of being with a woman who you’re not in love with. I’ve become a companion and take care of you in ways you’ve come to rely on. I learn to love a man who finds purpose in life by measuring the rain and watching the first days of spring unfold. I observe how you rally towards the “unofficial competitions” between you and your neighbor as to who will do a better job at mowing their half-acre of property. I watch you from the kitchen window. I get glimpses of what it must feel like to be a wife, and I stare at my left hand, gloved in suds, knowing I’m not even wearing a promise ring. You tell me you love me, and I believe it. And I ask myself, isn’t that enough?

Anything important bears a critical distance. I watch you lock the truck and walk around the back of the boat, poking your head between the boat and the tree. You make your way to me. Hand-in-hand, we walk up the hill in the dark to the lakefront restaurant to order our favorite burgers. I don’t like red meat, but I make you uncomfortable when I have too many questions for the waitress about the menu. Tonight, I’ll keep things simple and say, “I’ll have what he’s having.”

* * *

These are the memories, the pauses I take in our relationship that will eventually become ingrained in me, not so much about what our conversations were as we ate our burgers at the counter, in fact, I can’t seem to recall a single subject. Sometimes, I think about how, when we first met, our dinners became disregarded, and how, two grown people could become so content to nibble—the light from the refrigerator illuminating our naked bodies. And I think of the shadows that followed, dancing with us, all the way down the long hallway back to the bedroom. It’s interesting how new love must appear to the other rooms, the ones hardly used, inside the house.

Food was always a subject with us. When we first started dating, you used to take pictures of the meals I made for you: roasted chicken and potatoes, with the smell of fresh thyme traveling through your house. The thyme came from a garden that only measured about seven feet across, growing only thyme. It was those years I lived in the house with you I remember the aromatic waves finding its way into the house and into almost every dish we made together. But, eventually, we began to fight over food. You tried to convince me it was healthy to skip meals. I explained to you the university dietitian told me that when people fast the body stores its next meal into fat. Not knowing who was right, we both finally gave up. Eventually, I learned how to open the cupboard and sneak almonds from the bag, without making a noise, to curb my hunger. Eventually, I began fooling you as to why I was not so hungry at table. Today, I wonder if the woman you married uses fresh thyme when she cooks? Do you photograph her dinners, too?

* * *

Life always moves slower after a burger. We take our time going home, accepting the silence in the cab of the truck. It seems dark inside the cab, like the house we’re coming home to. Sometimes when we do speak on the windy way home, our conversations include what it must be like to live on the lake. You talk about selling your house. I wait for you to ask me what I think. I want to support you, but I’m still young and selfish. I think you can tell that I haven’t a clue about real estate. I smile and say, “That would be great.” When really I’m thinking about how we’ve been together for five years, and I’ve never even asked you for a ring. It seems forced, I say to myself. I remember once at Sam’s Club I asked you to look at a diamond ring in the jewelry case, but you waved your arms in your yellow plastic sailor parka and said, “We didn’t come to Sam’s to look at rings!” Embarrassed, I lost myself, one last time, at a ring in the shape of a flower, its petals saying, sorry, to me. It wasn’t even an engagement ring. Where did you go? I find you, perplexed over what brand of paper towels to buy. You put a twenty-pound bag of rice in the cart and tell me we’re going to make more meals with rice. I nod in agreement. Rice is high in calories, but I say nothing.

I tell you I had too much Diet Coke at the restaurant. You pick up speed with the truck and the boat seems frantic as it bounces over the road. It’s all business now. Our dreams of living at the lake blur past us as we talk about what we still need to do to get ready for Monday. We’re almost home. We’re on the last stretch of the highway now. We’re traveling, like so many times before, and making a gradual climb towards the southern Yosemite foothills. The wind outside my window is warm. I extend my arm out; I’m flying, flying away towards something that I don’t have the words for. I sense you’re looking at me. I pin my soul to the skyline, my whole body feels as if it’s running alongside the truck and I’m no longer with you, and then, I feel your hand reach out for me. We hold hands for the last twenty minutes home. I can tell by strength in the way you hold my hand that I will sleep soundly in your arms tonight. The smell of Irish Spring from the shower you’ll take when we get home will still be sticky sweet when you climb into bed. I imagine my head buried into your damp chest, fresh from the shower. Exhausted, we will interlock and speak using only our feet.