Battleborn: Stories by Claire Vaye Watkins

Author:Claire Vaye Watkins [Watkins, Claire Vaye]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781101596753
Google: 1XkBTAl1eM4C
Amazon: 1594488258
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 2012-08-02T07:00:00+00:00

THE ARCHIVIST

There was no salve for the space he left. If there had been—if science had developed an ointment for heartache or a pill for the lovelorn—I wouldn’t have used it. I wanted pain. I wanted cataclysmic anguish. For that, our old ritual.

So every night I’d get home from my job as a clerk at the public library and draw a bath with water as hot as I could stand. On the kitchen chair beside the tub I’d put a cheap bottle of cab, a book, a pack of cigarettes, a joint and a sleeve of peanut butter cups I’d bought at the Winner’s around the corner, where I bought the wine.

One night, especially plowed, I called my older sister, Carly. I told her Ezra and I were through. I said, “For real this time,” which I said every time. She said she’d be right over. “Bring the baby,” I said.

I waited for Carly in the bath, drinking wine from my blue-flecked enamel camping cup. Once, Ezra called the cup my cowboy mug, and with him gone I couldn’t stop seeing it that way. I felt insufferably rustic whenever I drank from it, and yet I didn’t stop drinking from it. That’s what he did to me: permeated, saturated, submerged me in him. Now, I submerged myself. I surfaced, took a cigarette, and breathed him into my foolish hungry lungs.

I started smoking the night we met, when Ezra stood up from the bar where we’d been playing video poker, said, “I’m gonna go outside” and put two fingers to his lips, that smoker’s sign language. It looked like he kissed them softly, the thick pads of his fingertips. I had a good man at home, waiting for me. I said, “Me too,” followed him outside and smoked the first cigarette of my life. I was twenty-six. The street was dark except for a Winner’s down the road, glowing like a beacon. Ezra leaned in and gave me a light. Then he pushed my hair back from my face. “I give this a week,” he said. “You?” “Two,” I said. “Tops.” He smiled this absolutely lethal smile and we smoked silently against the quaking of the freeway and the darkened machinery of the recycling plant across the street. I asked my boyfriend to move out the next day. I knew then that I would follow Ezra anywhere he’d let me.

• • •

Carly let herself into the apartment and called for me. The baby squealed. Carly lost one of her fallopian tubes to an ectopic pregnancy when she was my age. Between that and her husband Alex’s reversed vasectomy, my niece is a regular miracle. I love her more than a person ought to love one thing.

My sister came into the bathroom and said, “Oh, honey,” her face creased with empathy. She set the Miracle on the floor beside the tub and surrounded her with pastel toys, which the baby ignored. The Miracle played exclusively with adult things. Keys. Eyeglasses. Cell phones. Just a year old and already she was a severe child.

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