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Shellie Zacharia QWERTY Hula Hoop The first time Gene Weaver saw Kate she was outside on the sidewalk, a hula hoop rotating around her hips. He liked the way she swiveled, the smile on her face, so childish, delighted, and he especially liked the way her arms were up in the air, as if she were pulling down clouds. He kissed her right there on the sidewalk, outside the music store where he sold used guitars and drums, and sheet music and tuners and picks and used CD's. He grabbed her arm. The hoop spun and clattered to the ground, and he pulled her to him, kissed her full smiling lips and thought I could love this woman with her hula hoop. It began to rain, and she tilted her face upward. She stood there, eyes closed, rain splashing her cheeks. That was a little over two years ago, and this morning Kate rolls over in bed and says to Gene, “The world has gone gray.” How do you respond to that? Gene wonders. Do you run to the museum and rush through rooms, shouting “look look look” or do you pull Kate outside and fall on the grass and say “sun clouds birds leaves rain flower flower flower” your voice growing louder, more urgent? Do you turn on music mad loud and whisper “close your eyes listen guitar hands strum love” so that your words tickle her ear? How do you respond? The world has gone gray. “I'm tired, Gene Weaver,” she says. “So very tired.” Gene is tired too. He feels heavy-limbed, his arms refusing to lift, his legs like stone. He can turn his head, but he doesn't want to. He remembers when this felt good - this feeling of being immobile. Buried in the sand by his uncle and father on a family beach vacation, a young Gene laughed and tried to stay still - don't move, don't wiggle - the sand being pushed by bulldozer big hands onto his stomach, legs, chest. He spit sand. He liked this, body entombed in heaviness, the coolness, so heavy, very heavy, and he such a small boy. But then he was such a strong boy, he could move a toe, shift a leg, flex an arm, and all the sand shifting, moving, rising with his limbs, and there he was, free, air against his skin. These memories come often to Gene. Childhood. While for Kate it is thoughts of child. He does not connect them - they are not the same, childhood, child. His thoughts are a longing for something simpler, and a child will not be that. He closes his eyes. Sleeps. When Gene finally gets out of bed, he finds Kate at the computer. “I am learning to type,” she says. “Getting better every day.” “The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy cat,” he says. Her fingers stop moving; she lifts a hand to brush a stray curl from her face. “What?” “It's a sentence that has all the letters of the alphabet,” he says. “I think, wait.” He goes to the computer, leans over her, and types the sentence. “No. Dog.” “Dog?” She looks up at him. “See the c is in quick. It's dog.” This he remembers from high school, the rows of typewriters clacking and zinging, how Missy Gaines wrote him love letters in between practice lines. “There are four o's, two e's,” she says. He looks. She's right. He stares down into the crooked part of her hair. It is a pale white. At thirty, she is still child-like in many ways. He loves this about her, the zigzag part, the butterfly hair clip, mismatched socks on her small feet. “I'm just trying to help,” Gene says. Kate nods, her head continues to bob, fingers touch the keys in front of her. He puts his hands on top of hers so the screen shows jkdsvl. “I'm okay,” she says. “Good.” He doesn't believe it, but for now he wants to hear it. He has to go to work. In the evening, when he returns, the mail in one hand, a copy of an old Led Zeppelin CD in the other, she comes to him waving a sheet of notebook paper. “I've tried to make new sentences. It isn't easy to make a sentence where several letters aren't repeated.” He takes the paper, scans the sentences. Quiz taking on Wednesday forces jumpy. . . (missing b h l v x). Kate is wearing a tiny t-shirt, her flat belly showing. She rubs it, in circular motion, as a pregnant woman might. “What about your typing?” “Getting better. Fast, but lots of mistakes.” “I'll try to make a practice sentence,” Gene says, but he falls asleep before he can, an incomplete sentence scrawled on the back of a magazine: Couples who bark quietly during mojo sex (f v z ). Kate creates new almost sentences for days straight. He comes to expect them. After she reads one with the words orgasm and quiver but which lacks the letters d, l and p, he takes her to the bedroom and tries to help her through her sadness with fingertips tracing letters on her collarbone. He says “sweetsweetKate” into her ear, and she is smiling when he looks at her and he thinks typing is the answer. Typing will cure his wife of the grayness. Tubing It is a blue sky Saturday when Gene says, “Let me take you tubing on the river.” He wants her to see blue. He wants her to see the pale mint of the Ichetucknee, the black wave of seaweed carpet below, the darker green of the trees. He wants her to lie back in the inner tube so that she floats, looking at the sky and leaves and white cotton clouds, the tips of her black curls dragging in the water. “It's hot out. It would be nice to feel water,” she says. And so there is a day with a drive and songs on the radio. Kate turns to the country station and he thinks about how country songs really do fit his mood lately, all that woe and heartache and name calling, but not today, not today. Lately, thoughts have been coming to him in twos - repetition, reminder - it's a good day, good. He wonders if this is new, this brain stutter, or if he is becoming one of those Eastern-thinkers. His buddy Rex, who goes to a yoga and chanting class, talked about mantras once, deeply, intensely, hands clasped in prayer pose, he spoke of words and energy and Gene just drank his beer and shook his head and thought, “Man, we were once good friends.” But here now, a mantra - good good. They run to the river dock in an awkward scurry, inner tubes tucked under their armpits and bumping their thighs. Kate throws her tube into the water, she is in air, arms up, and then splash, she submerges, rises, and Gene follows. The river is cold, shocking. They float. Toes trace lines in the river current. Kate's fingers pluck the water. She sings made up songs about mountain walks in moonlight and square dancing on acid. She is an artist, she sculpts clay, figures typically sleek and elongated, forms rising upward with hands above, goddess-like forms in red-orange, women lit by fire and longing. Gene alternates watching Kate with scanning the riverbank for turtles in the sun. He sees her today as he did when he first met her: childish, silly. He thinks of the hula hoop and wonders where it has gone. It is, perhaps, in her studio -- a room filled with magazine photos tacked on the walls, along with song lyrics he hands her, family photos and objects she has found at garage sales. “Where's the hula hoop?” he asks. She has floated ahead of him and does not hear. He says it louder, needing to know. “Where's the hula hoop?” he calls and she lifts her head from the tube, turns to look back at him. “Hanging on the studio wall,” she says, and suddenly he can see it there. “Good.” He is happy knowing. It is something. This perfect moment in the past. “Look,” he says and pulls a small flat bottle of Jack Daniel's from the pocket of his bathing suit. “You're bad,” she says and motions for him to pass the bottle. Her laughter rises into the live oak branches, hangs there in the Spanish moss. This could be a country song he thinks. Me and my crazy gal floatin' on the river and drinkin' whiskey 'til we cry. “I had a boyfriend named Jack D once,” she tells him. “Dawson was his last name, but we called him Jack D.” Gene is always finding things out about Kate. They are still new to each other, two years later. “He was a bastard, right,” Gene says. He wants all her old boyfriends to be bastards; he wants her ex-husband to be a criminal. He paddles to catch up to her, pass the bottle. Warm whiskey burns his throat. “Yep,” she says. Gene wants to say something, to continue the conversation that will make this day just right, but there is a group of boys, tubes roped together off on the bank. Boys in trees, boys on land, shouting, teasing adolescent cracked voices, and Kate is looking up at a boy who has shimmied up a tree branch jutting out over the water, and the pals are chanting “jump jump jump” and Gene looks up too. The boy is starting to back down, when a man on the bank yells, “Boy, get back up there and jump, you chickenshit” and the boy just might cry but he stops moving and Kate and Gene float on. Gene turns back to see if the boy does jump. They are too far away, and there is just the moment of leaves and logs and summer sun. “That man's a bastard,” Kate says. Gene agrees. His own father was a timid man, a quiet man. Gene's mother ran the house; his father let her, kept busy silently reading his newspaper, drying dishes, whittling wood pieces under the front porch light in the evenings. “We'll have a boy one day,” he almost says. But he doesn't. Pangrams A mad boxer shot a quick, gloved jab to the jaw of his dizzy opponent. Gene walks in the kitchen and finds the cabinets are dotted with yellow pieces of paper with words neatly printed on them. “I have found Web sites with lists of alphabet sentences,” Kate tells Gene. “They are called pangrams.” Gene nods but is bothered. “Isn't that cheating?” It seems to be, though he knows that the original purpose of the sentence was for typing practice. It has become something they share - this attempt to make something complete. He walks from paper to paper. There are perhaps a dozen. He has tried to create the sentences, which he scribbles on the backs of magazines, sales receipts, and invoices. It has become something like relief, this challenge to make sentences. Kate shrugs. “I also learned a bit about the typewriter's history,” she says. “I'm changing the name of the cat to Qwerty.” He looks at the cat sprawled on Kate's lap, one arm out like it is ready to throw a left hook. It is sleeping, or perhaps just faking it, eavesdropping on a conversation Gene is sure will go wrong. He can see it in Kate's eyes, her smile a thin line. “That's fine,” he says. This too he remembers, Missy Gaines sliding the waistband of her denim skirt down so he might see her new tattoo - a blue dolphin, leaping through the air. “Oh, to be that dolphin,” he said, and the teacher, Mrs. Morales, plodded toward him with her eyebrows knitted into a bad thread, taut and knotted. Missy giggled, Gene typed, sighed, his hands wanting to fly across the keyboard and fall into Missy's lap. “Don't you want to know the history?” Kate asks. He looks up from the cabinet, realizing he has been staring at the word dizzy so that the letters themselves are just lines, meaningless, cryptic. “Tell me,” he says, amazed at his own patience. “Maybe we can go get some food?” she asks. He sighs. This is how it is. Unfinished sentences, unfinished conversations dismantling their lives. Kayaking The explorer was frozen in his big kayak just after making queer discoveries. Gene wakes and remembers his dream. He closes his eyes to keep the dream in. There is something pleasant about it, he thinks, yes, something pleasant. He is kayaking across a lake, blue green and clear, so clear he can see his reflection moving downward, falling into sand and pebble and shell. On the other side of the water, he knows, is a tree house hotel, where he will stay for the night, in a loft close to the stars. He is paddling, and then there is a moment of confusion, a fish jumps in the kayak, it is flapping on his legs, he drops the paddle, shouts. He knows he should not stand. He stands, flips, he is in the blue green water, and he laughs, reaches for the kayak that he must right. He knows it will be easy; in a dream it can be. When he wakes, Kate is sitting in front of the television, wearing the green satin robe he bought her for Valentine's Day. She is mouthing the letter b, again, b, again, b, and then he can hear boy, baby, blue, button, bird. She is watching Sesame Street. “You need to go make art,” he says. He never says this, demands she produce something. She is actually successful, selling many of her goddess sculptures at street art festivals. “It will make you feel good.” He believes this, knowing he feels better when he is songwriting. Kate looks up. “When's the last time you watched Sesame Street?” she asks. Gene shakes his head. “When I was five, Kate.” “No need to be nasty, Gene Weaver,” she says, turns her head back to the television. “It's still a good show.” Rain song Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs. It is raining, and Gene is staring out the kitchen window when he slams his glass on the counter. There she is, standing in the backyard with nothing on but a pink bra and lime green panties, an opened umbrella in one hand, wine bottle in the other. Kate is singing, he can see that, her eyes closed, her head tilted slightly back so that song will be caught in the umbrella. Lyrics will rain back down on her, echoing, making her crazier than she already seems to be. “Get the hell back in the house, Kate,” he shouts. “Get the hell in the house.” His words bounce off the windowpane; he is sure she did not hear him. He curses, tosses his plate in the sink, it cracks, he hears it, and he goes out into the rain to get his wife. She is singing one of his songs, one he wrote years ago when he played in a band. He grabs her wrist, the one holding the wine bottle, pulls her to him. “Come inside,” he says. He is tender, says it quietly. She is crying, he sees that now. Inside, he makes her sit in the rocking chair. He goes to get her a dress to put on, finds a pretty one, pink and yellow flowers, a thin strapped sundress, and hands it to her. “Put this on. Let me make you some lunch,” he says. Gene is afraid, and he doesn't like it. He remembers being ten years old when he and his best friend would ride around the neighborhood on a single bicycle, one boy peddling, one perched atop the handlebars. They were swift and ninja-like through the streets, shouting out at dogs and cats and smaller kids playing on the front lawns. At the top of the hill, they'd pause - ready - and then downward, the one on the handlebars more scared then the one steering - ride the brake, ride the brake, no let up, faster, faster - the heat picking up their words and tossing them like sweat droplets. But it isn't like that now. He doesn't want to go faster or brake. He wants what is impossible, to go backward. “Kate,” he says over and over, her name moving into Kay Katie Katie girl. She looks up at him, smiles and closes her eyes, sleeps. He goes to the phone and calls her sister. Send Katie Jaded zombies acted quaintly but kept driving their oxen forward. Kate will visit Nancy who will do sister things, like make popcorn and margaritas, listen, assess, claim that Gene is at fault or insist that Gene is right. Actually, Gene has no idea what Nancy will do, but he has asked for her help. She has said to send Kate. “Send Katie,” she said, sighed, so that Gene had to ask, “Is everything okay with you?” “No,” she said. “I'm always tired. I've got three kids.” Gene thinks that the two sisters may just sleep away their time together. They may put on a movie, some chick flick that women rent when men aren't around, and they will laugh for the first fifteen minutes, or say things like “I wish” at the television, and then they will sleep, each for a different reason. The morning Kate gets in the car to leave, Gene leans in the open window, cups her chin in his hand. He looks into her eyes. They are hazel, wide, and she smiles. “I'm okay,” she says. She puckers her lips; he leans in. Spin While making deep excavations we found some quaint bronze jewelry. “The greatest guitarist is Stevie Ray Vaughn,” says Brady Irwin, the college kid who works for Gene on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. He's actually not a kid; he's 26, just six years younger than Gene. “The J's,” Gene says. “Jimi and Jimmy.” “Man, I don't know.” It is a conversation that can go on. It has played itself over and over. One day it is Vaughn and Page - another day they consider the merits of Garcia and Santana. “Are we talking rock?” “Yeah.” Gene can rely on Brady for a good mental game. Best guitarists. Who would you rather sleep with: Marilyn Monroe or Audrey Hepburn? Things like that. Gene considers telling Brady about trying to make pangram sentences but decides it is something private. “My wife is going crazy,” Gene says. “She's staying with her sister right now.” It is odd, Gene knows, to have said this. But it comes out, this secret he has held in. He has been thinking about the word crazy. It has a z, y. Brady looks at him. “What woman isn't crazy?” “Seriously. It's not good.” He puts down a pair of drumsticks. “Yeah?” “She wants a child but hasn't gotten pregnant yet.” “Oh.” Gene is grateful that Brady answers in this way - it is satisfactory, this one syllable pause. It is better than jokes about inadequate sex. It lets him speak. “I don't think I want a kid,” Gene says. “That's what I'm thinking.” In the evening, Gene sits alone on the front porch, his guitar across his lap like he might play pedal steel or he might rock a baby to sleep. His fingers softly brush the face of the instrument while he stares out at the azaleas that gather in small parties around his property. They have bloomed, light pink, white, red, magenta flowers. He knows that each day he will see more until the bushes seem to have exploded, flower obscuring green. It begins to rain, and Gene allows himself memory. There was Kate, hands in the air, hula hoop whirling, a blur, a smile, rain drops caught as white light. He had brought that girl home, shown her his record albums. She sat on his sofa with her legs curled into her like a child. She asked for a blanket. She nodded yes, yes, to music she knew and he knew he would marry her. He sits back in the chair, long legs stretched out before him, air forced from his chest and lips with a sigh. He thinks about Kate's voice on the phone, soft, small, her words spinning around him. Later, maybe tomorrow, he will call and check on her. He will say, “Just the two of us isn't so bad. The two of us can be good.” He closes his eyes. The rain falls like letters dropping into place. ©2005 by Shellie Zacharia Shellie Zacharia teaches in Gainesville, Florida. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the Raleigh News & Observer's Sunday Journal, Washington Square, South Dakota Review, Dos Passos Review, The Powhatan Review, and Parting Gifts.

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