Something about the open grasslands, the prairie dogs, and the saltbush called to the writer in Clare. She missed the Panhandle where she’d grown up: the chokecherry, the prairie chickens, the coral honeysuckle.
Clare’s English teacher, the one with the boots and dangly earrings, used to tell her, “Make those sentences simmer and shimmer!” and Clare would double down over her lined paper, scribbling faster than hail dropping like bullets from the Texas sky. She dropped out of high school at seventeen but kept the spiral notebook and filled it with more sentences, just like her English teacher had taught her. A grief-filled letter she’d written to herself after Mama died. A description of a lonely seaside cottage she’d seen in a photograph. An acrostic poem about a calico cat playing with shadow and light.
Clare was twenty-three, living in central Oklahoma. It was a long way from home. She wanted to write a novel and get it published, but it felt late to accomplish that. Sometimes she thought she’d give anything to sit for an hour on that worn couch with the dented cushions in her tenth-grade classroom. Clare could still remember the smell of her English teacher’s hair, a mixture of peppermint and permanent marker.
I’d be satisfied with one good sentence as long as it sings so beautifully it’d make Cormac McCarthy drop to his knees. Clare felt proud that she knew who Cormac McCarthy was. Her teacher had told the class all about this Texas writer and shown them where El Paso was on a map. This famous author lived four hundred miles away from their schoolhouse in the Panhandle. He might as well have been from Australia.
“Fuck,” her husband said from the other end of the couch. He held his flip phone like a mechanic holds a wrench, like a tool to be wielded. Grimacing, he unfolded his lanky body. He was twenty-eight, but ten years of refinery work had taken its toll. “Boss wants me to come in tonight.”
Clare had met Ray Willis on a summer evening two years ago at Sips, a pub she visited from time to time after work. She’d slip in for one beer, find a table in a corner, and scribble away in a spiral notebook just like the ones Mama used to buy her for school.
Ray was a regular. The bartender said, when Clare asked, that he worked at an oil and gas company. He’d discovered a major gas leak the previous year and shut down the plant just in time. The news reported that hundreds might have been killed if he hadn’t sounded the alarm.
One evening, Clare was there jotting notes about the protagonist in her novel. What was the climax that Tara was catapulting toward? Clare couldn’t decide, so she wrote, Tara’s future was a giant tumbleweed.
Ray and his friends were extra rowdy that night. The bartender grinned. “Probably won’t get much writing in tonight, honey. Might as well have another drink.” Then the bartender nodded toward Ray’s table, “You know what they say about those oil and gas guys after a few beers.” Clare did not know what they say about oil and gas guys after a few beers, but she sat at the bar a few minutes and studied Ray laughing and joking with his buddies. His body moved confidently, like a river carving its path through a canyon. Clare noticed his leather boots. They had deep creases that reminded her of her daddy’s boots.
An hour later, Clare decided she’d written enough; it was time to head home. When she looked up, she saw Ray staring intently at her. He was like a cowboy eyeing a calf he’d chosen to lasso. Clare felt paralyzed. Then without warning, he shoved back his chair and walked toward her, his boots making such great strides that Clare had zero time to think about what she’d say when he got there.
Ray helped himself to the other chair and rested his elbows on the table. Clare could see his eyes glance at her open notebook. She instinctively covered the sentence she’d just written with her hand. Her face flushed.
“My name’s Ray,” he announced. He didn’t ask her name, just leaned forward in his chair. “I’ve seen you here before,” he stated. Then he smiled, his teeth white as Jesus’s. She felt the lasso tighten. She watched Ray’s lips open and close as he talked about himself. She didn’t hear a word because her heart had left her body and was hanging in the air.
Run, she scolded herself.
But Clare couldn’t run. She was being shaken, stirred, mixed. All her feelings were clinking together like ice cubes. The voice offering to buy her a drink was far, far away; her desire was the only sound she could hear, and it was roaring like wind across a prairie.
Clare knew she must flee to the bathroom and collect herself, but she was sure her legs wouldn’t get her there. She breathed in this man: the side-swept lock of black hair, the thick beard, his mouth, and those clear blue eyes that reminded her of the quarry she used to swim in as a girl. And wanted to swim in again.
When Ray stood up to say goodnight, she stood up too. She felt her jeans hugging her hips. “My name … it’s Clare,” she said. His beard smelled like pine tar when he put his lips close to her ear and whispered, “I know.”
Seven weeks later, Ray proposed to her on one knee at Sips. The whole bar cheered.
Ray’s parents were dead, and Clare’s daddy was too ill to travel, so they married two days later in a white church with only the minister and church pianist in attendance. Clare wore her hair down for the wedding.
After the ceremony, the secretary, who was also the pianist, had them sign the marriage license. “God bless you,” she called out as Ray swept Clare off her feet and carried her outside to the parking lot.
Ray had attached tin cans to the back bumper of his Buick and written “Just Married” in shaving cream on the windshield. The letters were already beginning to drip in the bright sunshine.
“We’re married!” Clare shouted out her window to the cows as they drove away in the heat, tin cans clunking behind them.
The months passed quickly. Clare could hardly believe she was living with a husband in a brick house on Springer Street. Life settled into a routine: work, sex, TV, sleep, repeat. Twice a week, Clare met Ray at the bowling alley. Ray and some of his buddies from the plant were in a league. Clare cheered on their team, the Roughnecks, and kept score for them.
One cold February evening, six months after they’d tied the knot, Clare arrived at the alley before it opened. She cut the engine to save a few pennies and rubbed her hands together, trying to stay warm.
A tap on her window startled her. Roger, the guy who worked the shoe rental counter, motioned for her to put the window down.
“How ’bout hitting the lanes before the guys get here?”
Clare watched him flick his cigarette near her tire. “I don’t know,” she said. She hadn’t played since high school. Her daddy used to take her every Saturday.
“Ya got thirty minutes before league play starts.” Roger strolled off to open up.
Clare decided it would be warmer to wait for Ray inside. When she walked in, she saw that Roger had left a pair of size 7 black and red bowling shoes on the counter.
“On the house. Lane three.” Roger disappeared into the men’s bathroom.
Clare walked gingerly, getting the hang of gliding again on the smooth soles. At the ramp, she lifted balls until she found the perfect one: a swirly blue 14-pounder. Eyeing the pins, Clare positioned herself four and one-half steps back from the foul line. During the approach, her eyes stayed locked on the pins, her wrist uncoiled, and she snapped her fingers, releasing the ball. It spun down the alley, skirting the gutter before curving in perfectly toward the middle pin.
Roger whistled as a flashing X lit up the scoreboard next to Clare’s name.
Clare smiled at him. She felt loose, like she belonged here. It reminded her of growing up in the Panhandle, bowling while her daddy chain-smoked Camels and gave her tips: swing and slide, use your hips, find the pocket.
There was a lot of whooping and hollering by the guys when they arrived and saw Clare bowling strike after strike after strike. As the Roughnecks laced up their shoes, they joked with Clare that she should join the team. When Clare bowled a 200, it was Roger who held up a pitcher of beer and yelled, “Hell, the next rounds on the house!” Ray poured a tall one and then jumped onto a swivel seat and saluted Clare, waving his arms theatrically so he didn’t topple.
Hours later, when Clare pulled into the driveway on Springer Street, she could see Ray had beaten her home. She knew he was annoyed that the Roughnecks had lost to one of their newest rivals, some warehouse workers who had just joined the league. She saw him through the fogged-up window, the glow of the TV lighting up his face. He had a beer in one hand but looked like the boy in the third-grade photo she’d once seen of him, a kid in foster care, waiting for something to happen.
“You had a good time tonight,” he said with a lopsided grin.
She hung up her coat and scarf. “Yeah,” Clare said. “I did.”
“I had no idea you were so good.”
“Just lucky.” Clare kicked off her shoes and started toward the swinging door leading to the kitchen. There was a sink full of dirty dishes to wash up before bed.
Ray said to her back, “You enjoyed all that attention you got.”
Clare stopped, turned, and scrunched her forehead. “Huh?
“You know what I mean, Clare. You got off on those boys watching you, didn’t you?” Ray stared; his blue eyes boring into her like drills.
Clare paused, and then said, “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean,” he said, his eyes looking her up and down. Each word was sharp, like an icicle. Ray’s voice had never sounded this way.
She took a step away.
“What are you talking about?”
Ray stood up. “You, slut. I’m talking about you.” His words were slurred.
Clare felt the molecules around her slow to a halt. It felt like that time she’d taken a pill at a party and found herself in an alternate universe.
“Come here,” Ray’s voice was rough, but Clare’s feet wouldn’t move.
She watched her body from above as Ray covered the ground between them, his hands reaching for her throat. She watched as a woman who was not herself grabbed at a man’s hands to tear them away. She watched as that woman turned to run and the man grabbed her by the ponytail, yanking her to the floor.
The next morning, Ray made coffee and left it on the side table near Clare. Black with one creamer, the way Clare liked it. The sun shone through the living room windows.
Ray’s blue eyes were bloodshot. “Last night … that was fucked up.”
Clare’s body was under a blanket on the couch. She didn’t know how her body had gotten there.
“It’ll never happen again,” Ray said. His shoulders slumped forward, and there were tears, hints of them, glimmerings.
When Ray left the room, Clare stood and walked to the bathroom. It hurt to move. Inside she felt like when she and Daddy lowered Mama into the ground, like a piece of her had died. She took out her makeup bag and applied concealer to her neck, dabbing it on the swollen splotches, gently blending it in.
At work, Clare started to wear slacks and long sleeves even in the hot months. Her co-workers quit inviting her to go out with them during their lunch hour because she always turned them down. She knew they wondered what was up with her, but no one asked.
Clare began a new ritual. Pulling onto Springer Street after work, she would take three breaths, then crane her neck around the bend to see if Ray’s Buick was in the driveway.
Ray usually went to Sips or the bowling alley after work. If Clare didn’t see the Buick, her shoulders would drop, her jaw relax. Inside the house, she’d change into sweatpants and grab her notebook to write.
Tara thought the Texas sky was the most beautiful thing in the world. The blue filled her like a breath of air.
Clare scratched through the second sentence and wrote: The blue filled her like God.
When Ray got home, usually eight or nine p.m., he sat at the kitchen table and rattled off writing advice as Clare warmed up his dinner.
“Set some goals, for Christ’s sake. Define your metrics.”
He talked in clipped phrases. She guessed these were the kinds of things he told his team at the plant. Budweiser in hand, he explained to Clare that words were like data. She secretly thought, You can’t measure the sky or God.
One night Ray demanded she read out loud what she’d written.
“You’ve been on the couch all night. What have you got to show for it?”
Clare shook her head. “I didn’t—”
Ray interrupted before she could finish. “Goddamnit, Clare, it’s not that hard.”
Ray grabbed a pen. “Here’s how to write a sentence.”
On a napkin, he wrote a formula: adjective + noun + verb + adverb. He dropped a word into each slot.
A rabid dog growled angrily.
“Really, Clare, a sentence is so basic. If you can’t write that, what’s the point.”
Sometimes, Clare wondered if Ray was right. Maybe she wasn’t a writer.
At work, she increasingly struggled to focus. She would spin her chair toward the framed newspaper story about Ray at the refinery, how he sounded the alarm once and saved so many townspeople; her coworkers had hung it there as a surprise for her after the wedding. Then she would close her eyes and picture Ray on that day in his black pants, his pressed white shirt, and the tie with oil rigs imprinted on it, a present from his buddies at the refinery. She’d remember the story he told her that night about the time he ran away from his fifth foster home to buy Jawbreakers. Whenever she stared off into space, her boss Sandy would tap her on the shoulder and say, “Earth to Clare!” Once Sandy sent her a link to a website about adult women with ADHD. There was a multiple-choice test that Clare forgot to take because she had more than thirty open tabs.
Clare had gotten to the point where her brain felt detached from her skull. Every night, after sex with Ray, she lay in bed and images came and went—smoking under the bleachers in ninth grade, Mama’s perfect canned peaches, Cormac McCarthy’s belt buckle, which in her imagination looked just like her daddy’s.
Sometimes, Clare left work early, making an excuse about a doctor’s appointment or errand she had to run. She’d drive to a movie theater on the other side of town and buy a ticket for whatever was showing.
On the eve of her third wedding anniversary, Clare left work early to see a Tom Hanks double feature: Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail. She sat in the dark and ate her popcorn, flattening each piece on the roof of her mouth before swallowing it. She was like that, careful not to disturb; she liked to be invisible in the darkness, the images on the screen floating through her body.
When she stepped out of the theater, it was muggy. She drove home on back streets without her headlights on, past donut shops and billboards for 24/7 lawyers. She was thinking about how Ray had lassoed her once upon a time and how certain lovers are just destined for each other.
When she pulled into the driveway, there was the Buick.
“Where were you?” Ray asked casually before she’d even closed the door.
The synapses in Clare’s head snapped like the green beans she used to break so expertly for Mama’s Sunday dinners. Quickly, Clare tried to predict the best path to take, the one that would result in the least amount of hurt for all parties.
“I went out with Sandy and the girls.”
The lie rolled off her tongue easily—like bowling a strike.
Silence.
“Bull. Shit.”
There was more blood than usual this time. Hours passed before Ray took a break and Clare could crawl to her phone and dial 911. Ray let her do it. He knew he’d gone too far. He dragged her to the couch and righted a lamp. Ten minutes later, he let the paramedics in.
“She’s okay. Fainted, hit her head.” He eyed Clare, who was silent.
A woman with a buzz cut knelt in front of Clare. Clare thought she looked like Sigourney Weaver in the movie with the aliens but shorter and more compact.
“I’m an EMT. My name’s Tracy, and I’m here to help you.” Clare liked the sound of Tracy’s voice—deep and gravely like she snuck smokes between house calls.
She shined a light into Clare’s pupils and then took sterile gauze out of a duffel bag and applied some to where the blood was seeping. Next, she put a blood pressure cuff on Clare’s arm. She moved efficiently, telling Clare what she was doing before she did it.
Tracy’s sleeves were pushed above the elbow, and Clare could see a tattoo encircling her wrist and slithering up her left arm. A snake eating its own head. Clare remembered there was a word for that. Ouroboros. Rebirth.
“You’ll feel a little tightness,” Tracy said as she pumped air into the cuff. “If it hurts, tell me, and I’ll stop.” Clare studied Tracy’s hand as it squeezed the black pump. It was large for a woman’s hand, strong and capable.
Tracy’s eyes found Clare’s as she placed a stethoscope on the brachial artery to measure the blood flow.
“Your pressure’s low,” Tracy said matter-of-factly.
Tracy checked Clare’s other vital signs and instructed the other EMT to start an IV.
“This is ridiculous,” Ray said, pacing.
It was midnight. The red light on the ambulance lit up the street, spinning red lines into the darkness. Some neighbors came out and stood on their porches.
Clare felt her pulse beat slowly under Tracy’s fingers. The lup-dup made Clare feel safe.
“Time to head out,” Tracy announced, standing. She looked up at Ray, “We’re taking her in.”
The EMTs maneuvered Clare across the lawn in a wheelchair. She could hear Ray inside, cussing as he searched for the keys to the Buick.
Tracy opened up the back of the ambulance. “Let’s roll,” she said holding up the IV, so it didn’t tug at Clare’s arm.
Clare’s brain cleared. It’s over. She breathed in the oxygen coming through her nostrils, plentiful and clean. She thought about how brave she was to leave home at seventeen with a suitcase, thirty-nine dollars, and a notebook. She could venture forth again. Go back to Texas if she had a mind to. Buy a bowling shirt with blue stripes like the one her daddy once got her.
And that’s when Clare was struck by a realization that brought her to her knees.
Ray Willis doesn’t know shit about sentences.
Clare couldn’t wait to write that gem down in her notebook—a sentence that simmered and shimmered.
*****
Marcia Chamberlain is an educator and advocate for narrative-based medicine. She has published essays on medieval nuns and Chicano revolutionaries. She lives with lots of green plants and a black cat.
