Filled With Love - Filled With Love by Kate Evans

The President says time is drawing to a close.

Any mention of prospective bombing or troop formations or Middle East tensions or inspections floats Dan unconsciously to someone he hasn’t thought about in more than twenty years, the boy named Sigmund emerging skinny shouldered from a van, his long basketball body unfolding. Dan had watched him from the booze-in-plastic-cups crowd that was jammed on the lawn of the house of some girl’s parents who were out of town. Emboldened by keg beer, Dan had floated toward Sigmund, who guided Dan into the van and slam-dunked their mouths together. Apparently they had been thinking similar thoughts during class. They fell together like buildings finally giving way during an earthquake. They’d never talked about it again, but they continued to let each other surreptitiously glance at their quizzes in algebra, where they sat next to each other, their last names both beginning with L. It took weeks for the mustache-like bruise on Dan’s upper lip to disappear.

Dan’s wife Deb experiences bodily memories of her own, which have also been mysteriously surfacing lately, such as her first moments alone with Jessica Lin, also at a suburban parents-out-of-town party in some kid’s bedroom on a Scooby Doo bedspread. Until Jessica moved out of town six months later, they had as many sleepovers as possible. Deb spent hours her sophomore year nestled up to her powder blue princess phone in late-night talks with Jessica, hearing her mother, Margaret, snore contentedly from the bottom floor through the heater vent.

Dan’s family moved from San Diego to Dallas years before Dan’s adulthood homeland security worries, and years after the long-gone 1950s Cold War worries of his parents. He and Deb went to the prom together and a few years later sliced a sterling silver knife through a huge carrot cake frosted with pink and blue bells and danced their first husband/wife dance to Bobby Darin (retro was in) and spent a week on some beach in Maui, courtesy of Margaret. The blue-sky-palm-tree pictures they took are now curling in a shoebox in the bottom garage cabinet, their garage where no cars are parked because of the rusted camping equipment and boxes of baby clothes and old dog houses.

Two months ago Deb and Dan made their first trip to the sea in the seventeen years since their honeymoon, taking the drive to Corpus Christi, Deb in the back seat holding her mother’s ashes, seventeen-year-old Justin (who has issues with car sickness) up front next to Dan.

Attention to the math bears out that Deb was pregnant with Justin when she and Dan married. Her morning sickness is the reason they didn’t leave the Maui hotel room much, the reason that there are only six honeymoon photos in that box in the garage. On the floral bedspread in the air conditioned room, Dan fed her macadamia nuts and cold Pop Tarts, tender and excited for the baby that he planned to raise against the ravages of conformity. Deb, on the other hand, believed in some of the benefits of conformity.

Now Justin is the center of the basketball team and the student director of the school’s gay-straight alliance. When “Faggot” was spray-painted on his locker, he told a reporter for the local paper that just because he is leading the group doesn’t suggest he is gay or straight, and part of his allegiance to celebration of diversity and to ridding the world of homophobia is to be ambiguous about his sexual identity so that people will have to deal with him as a person not a label. He won president of student council after that, and his picture was splashed all over the yearbook.

Given his comments during the interview and his behavior since, Justin has an odd yet logical affinity for the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy and plans to enlist in the Army the minute he turns eighteen. Deb and Dan have asked him how an Independent-leaning-toward-Green-Party teenager with a retro (which is in again) Boy George tattoo and a tongue pierce can support a hawkish administration.

I have to take action, he says.

But there are plenty of other actions to take, Deb growls. She lists a series of them: peace marches and letters to the editor and becoming a legislative intern on the correct side of the issue and—

That’s too simplistic, says Justin. Who knows better about war than someone who has been in one?

You are risking your life and the lives of other human beings to know killing is bad? This is Dan’s contribution.

And what happened to your belief that our esteemed current President was not elected but staged a coup? asks Deb.

That’s my point exactly—the power is on the inside. That’s where I need to be in order to undermine, to subvert the system, Justin says, lightly patting his gelled hair spikes. He adds: And knowing and doing are not necessarily the same thing.

Oxymoronical thinking is not wisdom merely because it sounds smart, Deb grumbles.

Whatever, he says.

Justin, do you—do you have an affinity primarily for men or women? asks Dan when he comes into Justin’s room to put away folded tee-shirts and clean socks. Dan hopes Justin owns up to an attraction to men. That way he can out his son to the military recruiter, and Justin would never make it to boot camp.

Dad, he says.

Maybe the newspaper doesn’t have to know but I do.

Why, Dad?

Well I suppose we’ll figure it out next month when you go to the prom.

Dan wishes he hadn’t said this, that a boy-boy prom photo would be damning evidence to present to the recruiter.

Since when does who you take to the prom determine your sexual identity label? Justin asks, picking at his blue fingernail polish.

Since always, I think, dear son.

So you think the fags stayed away from the prom in your time? Get a grip, Dad.

Dan longs for the Justin of just a few years ago who wanted to know everything about Dan and Deb’s adolescent years, the TV shows (all of which were idiotic, says Deb; many of which were funky and fun, says Dan), the music, the clothing styles—the Justin who fantasized about his parents’ old friends entering the house as though from a time machine, with feathered, hairsprayed hair and Angel Flight polyester pants, boogying to the Bee Gees, disco balls gyrating in the living room.


In bed Deb says that the Orange Alert is the most ridiculous thing she’s ever heard and that the Administration is not protecting the U.S. from terrorists but egging them on.
Do you think I should pick up some plastic sheeting and masking tape and air filters nevertheless? asks Dan, reaching under her nightgown.

But Deb doesn’t seem to hear and shifts into talking about this week’s case, a lawyer suing a lawyer, plaintiff and defendant virtually indistinguishable, a young woman reading a magazine under her coat in the jury box, an old man snoozing in the jury box, the way she must reprimand them during recess like a school teacher.

Dan smoothes his hand over her legs that prickle with five o’clock shadow, and as she talks about Exhibition A, how the plaintiff tried to pull the wool over her eyes, he circles his hands over her thighs then slowly moves his body on top of hers, thinking about how he wants to tell her about Justin and the outing-to-the-recruiter idea if she would just take her mind off the bench for even a minute or two.

Images strobe through Deb’s suddenly sleepy mind as she moves with Dan, images of war planes and Jessica Lin’s long black hair and a ViewMaster slide of the sparkling Maui ocean.
Dan doesn’t have a memory, exactly, just a visceral echo of that skinny basketball body, the smell of the inside of the van, the fierce, bruising kissing.

*

It seems improbable but the same week that Deb gets a call from Jessica, Dan gets an email from Sigmund. Both say things like remember me, I tracked you down, what are you doing now, what’s your life like now?

Jessica is coming to town, must come for business, otherwise she wouldn’t fly even though it’s just over two hours from Chicago, with air travel so tentative these days, and the obligatory checking of shoes and maybe even body cavities, or so she’s heard, especially if you have olive skin and dark hair as she does. Deb plans for Jessica to first see her in her judge’s robe since she’s embarrassed by the size of her thighs and stomach, doesn’t want comparisons to her sleek fifteen-year-old body.

Dan wonders what was going through Sigmund’s mind when he plugged “Dan Leigh” into a search engine, stunned that Sigmund remembers Dan’s last name and probably the bruised face and algebra quizzes and the moment at the prom when, slow dancing with their dates, they exchanged a look.

That evening it rains so hard that the garage floods, ruining the curling, forgotten honeymoon pictures, which may sound foreboding, but it’s not, it’s just a coincidence.

*

Deb has been worried she’s getting cancer because she’s so tired all the time. She wonders if she should get that physical exam she’s been avoiding for years and that thought makes her even more tired, so much so that she has to avoid watching the old man nodding off in the jury box because it puts her at risk of her own eyelids drooping.

Even Jessica’s impending arrival isn’t waking her up much. She can’t reprimand the sleepy juror without a sense of hypocrisy. She thinks if it isn’t cancer, it’s radon in the courthouse or the phosphorescent lights or perhaps terrorists are really doing something with invisible chemical weapons. She doesn’t have much stamina to think about it too long, as she has to finish up this case and get to the grocery store on the way home without falling asleep at the wheel because Dan needs frozen peas and powdered curry to complete dinner, as he said in the phone message recorded by the bailiff.

Jessica arrives early, sitting in a seat by the front door, grinning at whatever memories she sees as she stares at Deb in her judge’s robe, the Honorable Deborah Smith-Leigh nameplate looming in front of her. How can it be that Jessica looks exactly the same except older, some creases around her eyes, a flash of silver in her black hair.

When they hug in the judge’s chambers at 5:35 p.m., right after Deb has reiterated her speech to the jury to not talk about the case with anyone over the weekend, Deb feels heavily weighted to the earth in the middle of small talk—what have you been doing all these years, what brings you back to town. She tells the bailiff she’ll lock up then shuts her office door. Rain pounds at the roof.

Jessica says that on the way from the airport in the taxi she heard that the country was now at Red Alert and that the action is heating up on the Gulf. She stands close to Deb, holds both of her hands as though no time has passed.

Jessica also says, I’m so sorry, I heard about your mother, and I never, never stopped thinking about you.

Deb moves her cheek against Jessica’s, in awe that Jessica is not different, Jessica just has a few embellishments—that flash of silver and a few lines like a successful addition that’s architecturally organic to the original building. Deb can’t believe it but Jessica begins to unzip her judge’s robe. They pull back, look at each other, smile.

They move to the leather couch, the drowsy, Honorable Deb and the magically reappearing Jessica. Deb’s sleepiness lifts for a moment so that the lines in Jessica’s skin appear three-dimensional, like the gleaming ViewMaster ocean.

At that moment, Dan is reading his second email from Sigmund, who now lives with his lover, Robert, in Florida, where they’re trying to adopt their foster children but are legally prevented from doing so. They are involved in a lawsuit against the state, but the lawsuit is not getting that much attention since everyone is so focused on the war, homeland security, terrorism. In the meantime, Sigmund and Robert are in danger of losing the son and two daughters, ages 3, 5, and 9, that they have raised since infancy. Especially the son, who has now been deemed HIV-negative, even though he was HIV-positive when they first became his foster parents. Sigmund has heard that Dan’s wife is a judge and former family law attorney who is known as a powerful child advocate who rarely loses a case—and he’s hoping that she might be able to help them out.

Deb and Dan’s city is one of several in the south that is quarantined the next day. It’s also the day Justin turns 18. People don’t quite understand what the quarantine means, and the TV, radio, and newspaper give conflicting reports. About twenty men and women from nearby towns have been hospitalized with some vague illness seemingly tied to a rare chemical called HR3 that may have been released through the mail, like that anthrax situation that seems like it happened eons ago, another life of terror.

The quarantine consists of road blocks and canceled flights and people being urged to stay calm and proceed with life as usual. There should be no concerns about going to work, going to the store. There should be no rush on anything, no buying to hoard because it’s likely this is just a preventative quarantine that will soon been lifted, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have extra batteries, food, water, and first aid supplies and a full tank of gas and extra plastic sheeting and tape, say officials, so stores are running low on the “suggested for personal homeland security” list that is splashed all over TV, the newspaper, and websites.

Justin’s birthday party is in the afternoon since he plans to go out dancing afterward even though his parents don’t want him out at night with the police acting like who-knows-what during this crazy quarantine time. Deb begs Justin to play the “my mom’s a local judge” card if needed, and he nods non-committal. His tongue looks oddly bare without its silver stud, which he has removed in preparations for boot camp, although with the quarantine his departure is delayed.
Because of the quarantine, Jessica Lin’s departure has been delayed, too, so she is at the birthday party, drinking champagne and eating cake with Justin’s friends and from a distance, in her hip hugger jeans and glittery shirt, looking not much older than they do.

She seems really nice, Dan says to his wife as he sets a platter of miniature quiches on the table.

I’m glad you like her, Deb says, biting into a quiche and burning her tongue. Oh shit, she says, gulping champagne to relieve her scorching mouth.

So what do you think of Sigmund’s email? Do you think you’ll be able to help him out?

After pressing her tongue against the outside of her cool champagne glass she says: Perhaps. I emailed him back, asked him to send me as much documentation of the case as possible. We’ll go from there.

Dan puts his arm around Deb’s waist, squeezing her in approval. Then he lifts his glass and taps the cake knife against it.

The chattering stops and they all look to him, the Chicana student council treasurer and her multiracial pals the pep squad leaders in their tiny navel-baring tee-shirts, the gangly white and black members of the basketball team with fresh faces and backward baseball caps, and the pierced-and-tattooed white gay-straight alliance contingent, who, as it turns out, are attending the prom as a group.

Happy birthday, Justin, says Dan, holding his glass aloft. Eighteen is a watershed year. I wish I was sending you forth into a world of peace. But now it is up to you and all you young people here to make peace happen for the next generation, since unfortunately my generation has failed so miserably.
Here here, says Jessica Lin, downing her champagne.
Everyone else stands silent for a moment, holding their champagne glasses up toward the dusky late afternoon windows, as though listening to see if chemical weapons make a sound.

*

Gas is now twenty-two dollars a gallon, and the lines are long into the second week of the quarantine. No one knows what’s happening with the people in the hospital reportedly exposed to HR3. A small town in Rhode Island is also quarantined, as are a cluster of suburban areas near Seattle. And the whole country remains on Red Alert.

The news reports that the country is still on the edge of war, with troops bulging in the Gulf. But the edge and the center are hard to distinguish since a few preemptory bombs have been dropped on a reputed munitions factory, which reportedly has been reactivated in total insubordination to American demands, says the President, his mouth held so tightly it looks like he’s being ventriloquized.

The local recruits have been granted a quarantine exemption and will be transported out by the army tomorrow. In Jessica’s hotel room, Deb breaks down, sobbing that her son is about to leave to war, how can it be, how can he choose to place his tender body, the infant body she nursed, in harm’s way. How fucking ironic, she cries, he wasn’t drafted, he’s choosing to go, how can it be, how can it be.

Jessica holds Deb, pushes back strands of hair wet from tears, moves her hands up and down Deb’s back trying to relieve the tight sobbing. Deb lets Jessica undress her, and they hold each other under the scratchy hotel sheets. Deb falls asleep in the crook of Jessica’s arm, and Jessica reaches over to the remote, clicks on the television. The preemptory bombs have hit their targets. The quarantine has lifted. The war has begun, explosions flashing in the sky all over the Middle East.

*

It costs almost four hundred dollars to gas up. As the radio ekes out the President’s words about the war that began in earnest ten hours ago, Dan watches the headlights cast their light east. Deb sits between him and Jessica, the backseat filled with Justin’s long frame, his back to the door, his legs sprawled across the seat, his handcuffed hands in his lap. No one had expected a judge to steal from the criminal court’s storage closet.

I swear I’m going to throw up, Justin says.

You always threaten that, but we’ve never seen it, even when you were a kid, says Deb. That’s what that bowl on the floor is for. If your puking really comes to pass, we’ll figure out some other seating configuration.

Can you even believe how much your parents love you? Jessica says, turning to look at Justin, whose face looks broader with his buzz cut.

Yeah, this whole fucking world is just filled with love, he says.

—and justice will prevail—the President is chanting through the radio.

I wish my parents had loved me like this, says Jessica, unruffled by Justin and the President. Her black and silver hair is illuminated by a passing car. My parents, she continues, seemed to hardly care if I lived or died. They were too wrapped up in their own problems, all the fights over their marriage, all their worries about money even though they had enough to buy another country with. Maybe that would have been a good idea—they could have each lived in their own self-purchased country. That might have precipitated fewer fights.

Or they might have just dropped bombs on each other, says Deb.

They were doing that anyway, Jessica says. Now your mother, Deb—her name was Margaret, yes?—was really amazing. She was walking, talking love.

Justin silently agrees. One memory comes to him, his grandmother spreading suntan lotion all over his face and arms, his riding shotgun in her convertible to Galveston and getting to drive the golf cart all weekend.

Dan, his hands on the wheel, remembers holding Deb’s hand, sitting in the living room, telling Margaret he’s gotten Deb pregnant, that they want to get married right away, and Margaret crying, kissing them both, and taking them out for margaritas, ordering a virgin margarita for Deb and laughing at the implications.

In Jessica’s mind’s eye she sees Margaret walking into Deb’s room where Jessica and Deb stand naked, breast-to-breast, and Margaret apologizing for the intrusion and saying that dinner is ready, then serving them chicken and dumplings and telling them about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.

Deb’s thoughts swirl all over the place, settling on her mother in bed, saying this dying thing is not all it’s cracked up to be; saying, I know you work hard darling, and I’m proud, but don’t let that take you out of the living, breathing world.
When Deb released her mother’s ashes to the water, some gray and grainy bits had caught in the wind and swirled onto the boat deck. It was as though her mother never stopped her resistance to leaving the world. It seemed that her mother’s voice had told her to steal the handcuffs, so in a way she felt that her mother was there in the backseat with Justin. Sitting in this car, her son behind her and her mother vaguely present, Jessica’s warmth pressing against her right arm, Dan’s warmth pressing against her left, Deb feels hundreds of miles away from her drowsy courtroom self. She is finally wide awake.

After the all-night drive, Dan thinks at first it’s Sigmund’s lover, Robert, at the door, but it’s Sigmund, Sigmund hugging him saying: Oh my god, it’s you, you’re here, how can this be?

Dan begins to see vestiges of Sigmund’s basketball legs unfolding from the long-ago van in this older Sigmund’s curly-haired thick legs that extend from Hawaiian-print shorts. The children, two girls and a boy, stand behind Sigmund, illuminated by the dazzling Florida sun.

Soon Justin, uncuffed and under promise of some thinking time, is stationed in the family room, playing video games with the voluble children, the smaller two fighting over his lap.

Dan, Deb, and Jessica sit on the back deck in the sun, drinking ginger iced tea with Sigmund and Robert, the swimming pool gleaming.

Our neighbors, says Robert, nodding his head toward the house with brilliant purple bougainvillea running up its side, have enough pills and powders to kill themselves and their children if there’s a terrorist attack.

It’s almost as though some people are hoping for the end of the world, Sigmund says, running his hand through his thinning black hair.

Time feels like it’s collapsing on Dan. His arms prickle with an indeterminate energy as he sits here in the bright Florida light with his wife and the man whose body he’d once held next to his own, ensconced in the flashing possibility of death to all.

Explain to me, says Deb, Florida’s defense of its gay adoption ban.

Sigmund talks about Florida’s argument that the unequal treatment is justified because it’s the state’s way to express disapproval of gay people. Robert adds that the state says it’s better for kids to be raised by a married mother and father, excluding them on two counts since they’re a father and a father who are not allowed by law to marry.

They all feel a twinge of a pull toward the future, doing their best to allay terror attacks and neighborly suicides and children dying and burning oil fields and missiles screaming, as they bask in the fact that the Florida state appeals court has agreed to hear the case three months from now. Three months into the future.

*

Jessica kisses each man on the mouth and then kisses Deb, soft and long, in front of the idling taxi in the driveway. It’s as though this kissing is not only allowed but required, fueled by this morning’s news about the thousands of dead civilians in the Middle East, and the police shooting into a peace rally in Boise that killed two young men, and the subway explosion in New York, cause unknown.

Jessica is sure her office has caught wind of the end of the quarantine, so she must go back to face inside sales, which have picked up significantly since her firm has procured a new contract with the war-fueled government.

As Jessica steps into the cab she says she will stay in touch and write letters to the editor in an attempt to get gay adoption some press in the Midwest.

Thank you, thank you say Sigmund and Robert, both a bit blurry-eyed as Jessica—who cooked a lasagna last night and who taught Justin some disco moves and who brushed out their daughters’ hair this morning—rides away.

Deb says, let’s go inside, we have a lot to do. I have to make some calls, and I want you guys to find those ACLU files and the copies of the Dade County depositions.

Dan hears screaming and splashing coming from the back of the house. Justin is in the pool again with the kids. Dan will put on his swimsuit and dangle his feet off the diving board and drink ginger tea. Or maybe he’ll make margaritas, lifting his glass to toast swimming in the pool. He’ll lick salt from the rim in memory of his mother-in-law, of Margaret’s celebrating her unborn grandchild. He’ll toast a long-ago algebra class morphing into a sunny Florida day, all the lucky-at-this-moment children playing in blue water.