"Jammed" Part 1 of 3

In one of my many incarnations, I am a writer.  The following is a work of fiction I wrote that a friend asked me to post on the blog:

Eric wanted to spend the weekend away in Palm Springs.  His parents have a vacation home in one of the planned communities, and he thought with the news that I was expecting, it would be good to get away.  I would have rather spent the weekend alone, but I knew it was unfair to keep him out of the decision-making process.  We weren’t married and we never planned to be.  He was a lawyer in downtown Los Angeles and I was his paralegal; it was the cliché office affair, meant to expire after a few weeks of racy mailroom encounters and fancy dinners, until he found someone prettier and younger.  Among the paralegals, it is a well-known fact that for every woman a young, corporate lawyer dates in the city, there is someone prettier and younger than her next in the queue.  Except my successor must have been running late, because after eleven months Eric still showed up to my apartment every Thursday night with Chinese take-out and a movie.  We spent most weekends at his place, he reading legal documents and me reading fashion magazines.  Sometimes we drove up the coast to have lunch in Malibu.  When a black Subaru crushed the back-end of my car, I spent a week at his apartment so he could drive me to and from work.  We cooked breakfast together in our underwear and after work we walked down to a local park to our favorite bench where he held me close to watch the sunset.  I couldn’t remember being so happy.

But at the firm, we never behaved as if we were more than friendly coworkers.  At first I was upset that he never met my gaze around the other lawyers.  It gave me the sense that I wouldn’t be the last secretarial notch on his bedpost, so I did my best from becoming too invested.  I never asked to make plans more than a week in advance and I was hesitant to call him more than The Guy I’m Seeing.  And then, at the office Christmas party two months ago, he surprised me by taking my hand as we walked around the room together.  Some of the other paralegals forgot their jaws on the floor and I realized I was in love with him.

On the drive to Palm Springs, he’s kept one hand on the wheel and the other fidgeting in his pocket.  I’ve spent the entire drive looking out the window of the car, watching the tall buildings race past us and turn into smaller buildings, then houses, and finally open fields.

“How are you feeling?” he keeps asking me.

“I’m fine,” is all I’m willing to tell him.  Ever since I realized I was late, Eric has hovered over me like a firefly at a flame.  He wants to know everything I’m thinking about him, about us, about the baby.  It’s evident he wants it.  Eric comes from a congregation of brothers and sisters who, well into their twenties and thirties, have all stayed close to their parents’ home in Fullerton and actually enjoy wearing matching sweaters for Christmas.  His older sisters Jodie and Nancy and younger brother Steve already have children of their own, and the pressure is on Eric to be next.  I don’t have any family left, so I can’t relate.

The green fields we drive past bleed out their color until they’re ashy beige.  Crops are replaced by sand and dust and all is still and empty, just as still an empty as Texas was sixteen years ago.  There, the ground was littered with shotgun shells and bullets encased in the desert’s sandy dust.  My father shot a few rounds into the distant mountainside and then looked at me to step forward.  I was thirteen and my hand was finally large enough to grip the pommel of the gun, in the notch between my thumb and forefinger, and still reach the trigger.  Every week he pulled out his handgun to test me on its mechanics—how to take it apart, how to put it back together, how to clean it, how to store it.  How to shoot it.  It was a matte black pistol, like the ones you see on cop shows and action movies.  A Browning dual-action, semi-automatic.  We would sit on the edge of his bed as he pulled it out of its gun case, a large black suitcase lined with grainy foam.  He removed the magazine and checked to see that the chamber was empty.  Handing it to me, he watched me expectantly, hoping.  Even willing me to pull the trigger of an empty clip.  The gun was heavy and it hurt to strain my forefinger out to the trigger, but I could do it.  I had avoided telling him for weeks now, but he had lost his job that day, meaning we’d probably have to spend a few days in the car while he looked for a new one.  I knew it crushed him, and I knew I could keep him from having a bad night if I told him I could finally hold the gun.  So I did.

His face lit up into a smile and he took the gun out of my hands to pull me into a hug.  He told me how much he loved me, how much I made life worth living.  It was as if I had won him the lottery.  Which in his eyes, I think I did.  His father was an alcoholic line cook that didn’t make it home many nights, and when he did, it was to force himself on his wife who killed herself by the time my father was six or seven.  That left my father to be raised by his older brother, who taught him how to shoot a gun when he was thirteen.  The first time he shot a gun, the aftershock of the explosion rippled through his body and it was such a force, such a power he wielded, that he no longer felt helpless in a world where fathers hit you and mothers died on you.  In his eyes, learning to shoot a gun was one of the first steps to becoming a man in the world.  And in a world where he could never give me our own house or a pet dog or take me to Disneyland like the fathers you see on T.V., it meant everything to him to at least give me that.  It didn’t matter that I was a daughter; I understood what he meant.

My father had grown up on the western edge of the Texas desert in the fifties, when there were still cowboys walking the streets.  When he didn’t weigh four hundred pounds or wake up attached to an insulin pump.  When he could walk more than a two hundred feet without having to sit down and catch his breath.

In high school, he had been an all-state football player.  He earned his pilot’s license when he was nineteen.  He was a search and rescue officer on a team of men that routinely climbed the mountains near his home to rescue injured hikers.  Or their bodies.  When he was seventeen he wanted to be a cop and woo damsels in distress or fly commercial airliners and charm stewardesses.  He was a man’s man, thriving on big dreams and testosterone.  But he wasn’t for long.  He and his older brother were sent away to Vietnam.  An astigmatism kept him from being safe in the cockpit of a plane, so they forced him onto the ground where there was no hope for any many but to end up dead or broken.  His brother ended up dead.  My father ended up broken.