THE WHITE BUTTON
Myfanwy Collins
In December the snow was so deep that deer knocked over the birdfeeder and denuded the shrubs at the front of Eve’s house, eating even the rhododendron leaves, all other forms of nourishment lost to them, covered over with white.
Hesitant sun poked through the evergreens and spiked the snowy yard that morning. It was mild. In the 30s. Earlier she heard footsteps squeaking up the snow covered drive—a man come to invade her house and kill her. But when she got up to check she found the dog in the hallway, his nails scratching against the tile from his dreaming movement.
Outside there was no man, but trees. Beyond the trees there were roofs, which throughout the region had fallen prey to ice dams. The eaves, heavy with ice and snow from rapid thaws and freezes and snows, were dammed so that behind them icy water backed up onto the roof and threatened to seep through into the house proper.
Ceilings caved in. Walls leaked. Nasty business.
Eve noticed the first drips in the window casings in the upstairs bedrooms. Soon the walls beaded and splotched. Her house was sweating on the inside.
She pawed through the tiny local phone book and settled on Fixit General Contractors. A man answered. “Talbot,” he said. She understood this was his name.
She spoke, breathless. Something weird was happening with her house. Water seemed to be coming from everywhere. Through her walls. Like a sign from God. Or the Virgin Mary. One of the stains might actually be in the shape of the Virgin Fucking Mary. She couldn’t tell for sure. Oh god, she needed help. Help. Could someone help? Please? She was a woman alone in these wild mountains. She needed help. Help me, goddamn it!
“I’ll be out this afternoon,” he said.
“I need you now.” In response, she heard him shuffling papers on a desk or table. Clearing his throat. The air moved in and out of his nose with precision. “The water is everywhere.”
“I’ll be there after lunch,” he said and hung up. Eve would have been infuriated if she hadn’t been so grateful. All she needed to do was wait until after lunch.
When Talbot arrived, Eve was standing in the driveway. She wore a bright orange down vest over a black sweater and jeans. Her dog’s leash rested in one hand and a toilet plunger in the other. “Thank god you’re here,” she said as he got out of his truck.
He nodded and eyed the roof. Icicles hung down several feet and a good foot of snow was backed up. It was a mess. “I’ll just get my ladder,” he said.
“What should I do?” Eve said. She twirled the toilet plunger in her hand as if it were an umbrella. The dog sank down and chewed on the crusty snow.
“Might as well go inside and wait. It’s going to take me a while.”
Each time he descended the ladder, she was there gawking at him through the front window, plunger in hand. Later, when they knew each other better, he asked her about the plunger. “I don’t own a baseball bat,” she said.
“So you were going to plunge my face off if I tried anything funny?” he asked.
“You got it.”
But he hadn’t tried anything funny. Instead he went about his work and thought about her. It wasn’t that she was so pretty. She was a good looking woman, sure. Strong jaw, clear eyes. But there were plenty of good looking women in the world. Hell, they even had some good looking women born and bred right there in the North Country.
He liked women, but in a fearful way. Partly because he was shy, but mostly because of his secret. Talbot still slept with a pacifier. He’d never been able to give it up and the only other person who knew his secret was his mother and she took this secret to her grave, God bless her.
This secret had kept him from doing just about everything he’d ever wanted to do—go to college, find a nice wife, have kids. None of it had happened because he could not bear to give up his pacifier. He’d sooner have died. And since he couldn’t give it up, he couldn’t foresee how he could ever sleep in a room with another human being. Just the thought of it filled him with a shame so blistering that his cheeks would redden and his hands would shake. And the shame made him crave the nipple—so supple and comforting against his tongue. He didn’t think there was anything else in the world that could make him feel so satisfied.
Eve ended up at the lake because it seemed to her there was nowhere else to go. Rather, there was nowhere else she could imagine herself being without wanting to peel her skin off strip by strip. It had been a childhood vacation spot. A place of memories—not necessarily happy, but not sad either. It was this middle ground she sought after Chet left her.
The last time she’d seen him was at the reflecting pool at the Christian Science Center. It was early June and stifling. Grimy children ran in and out of the fountain—some in bathing suits, some in shorts and t-shirts, others in underwear. Their weary parents sat on the sidelines, out of the spray, grateful for a chance to get their kids cooled off.
Eve waited for Chet on one of the stone benches. Above the traffic noise of Huntington Ave and Mass Ave and Boylston, she heard the whine of his motorcycle. He was going fast and he knew she would know he was and that it would irritate her. She gritted her teeth.
He was free to do whatever he wanted now. They were no longer together. She’d made that clear. Even though he was the one physically leaving—taking off cross-country on his bike—she was the one who left. Or at least that’s what she told herself. And this was the last good bye. He’d already moved all of his shit into the basement of his sister’s house in Framingham and now all that was left was for him to turn over the key to her condo.
He snuck up behind her, sweaty palms covering her eyes. “Ha, ha,” Eve said. He slid his hands away from her eyes and she smelled the lingering tobacco and motor oil from his skin and something else: the unique himness of him.
She was making a mistake.
He straddled the bench and sat facing her profile. He slipped the key into her hand. “You could have mailed it,” she said, turning the key over and over in her palm with the flick of her fingers.
He stood and took her by the hand and pulled her up next to him and then he bent her over backward and kissed her in a dramatic, winning way. He always had loved an audience. The kiss lingered and he reached a hand down the waistband of her thin cotton skirt and snapped the elastic of her underpants.
And then all that was left was the whine of his bike over the traffic. It was only later as she waited alone for the #39 bus that she realized he’d not said a word.
So she was at the lake and he was gone. She pictured him traveling west, his bike blazing past fields of sunflowers, tall grass, gazelles, and prairie dogs.
Before there was such a thing as online shopping, Talbot had to travel for his pacifiers. He had driven up to 150 miles to cover his tracks and always he ended up buying more than just the pacifier—he’d get diapers or a few toys as well, which he ended up leaving behind in a the bag in a shopping cart, hoping some needy parent would find them.
Sure, he had tried to quit, but always this ended in sleep deprivation and wild mood swings. He had toyed with the idea of hypnosis or something like that, but how could he do it when he’d have to tell the person hypnotizing him what he wanted to give up?
It seemed easier, then, to just carry on as he was and to resign himself to the fact that this was his life and that he would go out the way he came in, alone.
But then there was the worry. What if he died suddenly or what if he went mad or was paralyzed and needed to be cared for? People would enter his home, invade his sanctuary. He would be discovered. His secret found out.
Eve sold her condo in Jamaica Plain, put most of her belongings in storage, bought a little four-season cottage on the lake sight unseen and headed north, unsure of who and what she would find there. She remembered people from her childhood summers. She remembered Francesca, who had a moustache and sold penny candy in her store and how Eve was mesmerized by her, so much so that her mother had to warn her not to stare. “There’ll be no treats for you if you gawk at that poor woman,” Eve’s mother said.
Of course, as an adult she ached for Francesca. Why had she not bleached the thing? Waxed it? Eve herself knew how easy it was to hide one’s womanly deformities. And whenever she was lax about her grooming, she always had Chet to remind her, plucking at the stray black hairs growing up from her nipples.
The shame.
Men knew no such shame. She was convinced of this. All of their hair, all of their burps and farts and blood and fat, all of their many excretions, were just as they were meant to be.
Oh sure, they had erections, but these were easily covered over and dealt with. When had a man ever had to worry about blood in his underpants or, heaven forbid, seeping through the crotch of his white capris? When?
Up north she would be shameless. She would live alone in her small house and let the hair around her nipples flourish. It was a new beginning.
The house came furnished—a hodge-podge of maple furniture from the 50s. It would do. The view was, as promised, spectacular—mountains, sky, water. In the summer she would practice yoga on the dock as the sun rose and drink a glass of wine in that same spot at sunset.
It was electric baseboard heat, which would be expensive, but she had savings enough left over from her condo and she was sure she’d find a job. Teaching or something. Maybe she could write ads for a local paper? She hadn’t really thought it all through, but something would come along. Until then, she would settle into her house and wait for winter. It was September when she moved in. Chet had been gone for 63 days.
Never mind.
September was golden and red and burning orange. It was warm afternoons and chilly nights. However, September did not prepare her for December. The sun behind the mountains by 4. The dark mornings.
She had never known such silence—so quiet you could hear the ice groan as it froze. So quiet you could hear the cold settling onto the branches and filling up the cracks in the clapboards of the house. So quiet.
The dog showed up on Halloween. Eve put out a jack o’lantern and bought candy, but no children showed up. Before she went to bed that night she stepped outside to blow out the candle in the pumpkin when she noticed a dog sitting outside of the range of the porch light. He looked to be a shepherd mix. A sturdy dog, but skinny, sickly, stray. Normally she would have been terrified of such a creature, remembering any number of large dogs which chased her and her sister as children, but she craved.
She had always considered herself a loner when she lived in the city, but now this, this was really being alone and she didn’t like it. The wind was not enough. “I need more,” she surprised herself by saying out loud one night as she lay in the dark waiting for sleep. “More, more.” Repeating made it prayer rather than desperate plea in the darkness. More, more.
She bent and blew out the candle and met the dog’s gaze. “You might as well come in, then,” she said. He didn’t move. Was she dreaming him?
“Come,” she said and thinking better of it, “Come, boy,” unsure of his sex. She opened the door and showed him the way in with the swoop of her arm. He stood. She stepped over the threshold and then he did come trotting in, falling in a heap on the doormat, lifting his head only to lap some water and devour the can of tuna she put out for him. More, more.
He told her that the walls would need work. “Might need to replace the drywall.” Eve nodded, unsure whether this was true or not. She had never paid much attention to things—how they were constructed. That was Chet’s job. He was the one who walked through her condo with the inspector before she signed the papers. She hadn’t even known an inspection was necessary. “It’s just something you’ve got to do, Babe,” Chet said. And so she had.
She thought of him on his bike, rolling on, the wheel spinning into oblivion, as she nodded. She wanted to send him a message so that he might send one back and tell her what to do. “What do you think I should do?” she asked Talbot.
“Water can do a lot of damage,” he said, ominously. Eve nodded. She had heard from Chet—postcards forwarded to her from her old address. They were all from southern states, not what she expected. They were signed only with his name, no love or miss you. Just Chet. She got the feeling he wrote the same thing on all of the postcards he sent and he knew she would know that. It was a chastisement.
She had ridden on the back of Chet’s bike down to Providence once, weaving in and out of traffic on 93. On the way down, she’d been tense, her hands bunched into fists around his waist. But on the way home she’d been so tired that she fell asleep for a few minutes, her body trusting that he would keep them moving forward. She had been drifting, the air flying past and around her helmet, her body suspended—it was that place between life and death. An out of body experience. Had she seen light? When she woke she realized with horror that she could have killed them—leaned this way, fallen that way. But they had not died.
“Let’s fix the walls,” she said. Talbot nodded. She had made the right decision.
Talbot owned two bi-planes, each built from a kit. One of the planes he flew regularly in the summer; the other—he would tell his passengers once they were well above the ground—was at the bottom of the lake. Ha. Ha.
As a child Talbot jumped off cliffs, from tree limbs, arms and legs flailing from bridges into rivers below. There was something about the way his body connected with air. He had sky dived the one time and then decided to get his pilot’s license, which is what led to the biplanes.
When he was in the air, his secret was forgotten. And then there was the precious release when the pontoons hit the water, glided briefly, made contact. The landing, the takeoff, those were the moments of reaching the sublime, when he imagined a white button in the back of his brain shattering and splintering into exquisite release. He was young again, his father throwing him over and over into the air, the sun shifting and shadowing his father from behind. He had trust that he would not fall.
January was black and snow and then there was February—darkness leading to darkness leading to blue sparkles in the noon time. She had never really known winter before this. “Is every winter this way?” she asked Talbot. He was there several times a week, fixing her walls, her ceilings, projects that seemed to be taking longer than they should, but she was glad. He filled up the time between morning and night.
“What way?” he asked. He had a few corny jokes and some long, droll stories about local people she did not know, but other than that she found him difficult to converse with.
“So fucking cold,” she said. She hadn’t had opportunity to swear much since Chet left. It felt good and she was testing the water to see how he would react.
“I suppose,” he said. She leaned in the doorway of the room he was working on—her spare bedroom—and lifted her right foot up and hooked it behind her left leg. Had she offended him?
“I’ll take you up in my plane this summer if you like.” His offer drifted out in the air between them, purple and strange. She wasn’t sure what to say. It implied their knowing each other would extend beyond this season—that outside of his working for her, they would meet and enjoy time together.
He had not turned from his work but had stopped hammering, waiting—hovering in anticipation—for her to say something. She opened her mouth, but could not speak. She breathed in, out. He took up hammering.
One month before Chet left, he asked her to meet him at his work. He took her into South Boston, down to the loading docks. They’d been there before when they first met. He brought her over the chain link and onto a cement slab one night—they had a picnic, watched the murky water shiver as they drank wine right from the bottle. She’d been scared of climbing the fence, disobeying the warnings. They were trespassing. Later in their relationship, he’d come to mock her fear, always edging her forward until her toes were in space and she was falling off a cliff. And forward she would move, never wanting him to think she was not worthy of him, flawed and fearful though she was.
He led her back to that spot. It was a muggy evening in May, and still light. “Remember this?” he said, grabbing two fistfuls of fence.
“Sure,” she said.
He dug a foot in and started to climb. “Come on,” he said.
“I don’t want to.”
“Don’t be that way.” He hoisted himself up another foot. “Come with me.”
Eve crossed her arms, looked around to make sure no one saw them. She thought she might scale the fence, give in to his goading one last time. Show him that she was worthy. In the distance she heard laughter, horns honking. A breeze brought in a waft of rotting fish, kelp. Chet pulled himself up and over the fence, stood on the other side of it facing her. She didn’t move. Noted, instead, that his face was the fearful one. If she didn’t follow him, who was he then?
“Aren’t you coming?” he said.
After Talbot made his offer and could not take it back, the idea grew so large in his mind that he could think of nothing but taking Eve up in his plane. Before sleep he ran through the movie of how he would land near her dock and take her by surprise while she was sunbathing.
She would wrap a towel around her hips like a sarong and allow him to attach the belts around her when she sat in the passenger seat. He imagined the hot smoothness of her skin beneath his fingers as they glided over it.
He would see the water dividing beneath them as they took off, the sun shooting through the windows. She would turn and smile.
Talbot would point out the mountains on the horizon, the dark center, leading to the russet edges of the tannin-laced water. The dark green of the trees and the paler, more vibrant green of the fields. The orange sail on a catamaran, small now and far away.
He would say, Do you love it up here?
Yes.
Back on the ground, he would help her out of the plane and she would suspend in his arms, her mouth reaching for his. And when she kissed him, her tongue would linger on his tongue and he would suck on it so gently that she would not even notice he’d done it. Everything would fall away then, fall backwards and upwards. The gentle suckling. The white button opening up.
It was spring. Nearly a year since Chet had left. Talbot made a joke about a sunken plane. She did not react. She heard the whine of the plane engines, felt the vibration of air over wings.
Instead of seeing mountains and sky and water from the plane window, Eve saw herself turning from the chain link fence and walking back along the pier as streetlights flickered on in the distance. Behind her she heard the jingle of Chet scaling the fence, the slap of the soles of his Converse as he ran in the opposite direction.
The sky above her was a prairie divided by road. Hot black tarmac, a wheel pushing forward.
