Why Me?
The heart has its reasons ... but that's too obvious, isn't it?
[Hello, loves! Time for a flashback to last spring and the adventures of Dorrie and Statius. Those tales are mostly taken down from this Substack for editing, thrashing out, hashing up, submitting and being rejected, blah blah, but you don’t need any backstory to follow this little snippet.
This one’s written specifically on the direction of my writing group: “You haven’t shown us one reason for Dorrie to like Statius. He’s horrible. We’re confused. And we can't sympathize with her unless we understand.”
So I made him ask her, using more or less the wording of their complaint. I’m not sure the answer is satisfactory, but imma submit this next and see if it works as a fix.
It’s delightful to spend time with these two folks again. But I’m not sure I’d add this to the book — it feels kind of self-indulgent. Comment and let me know what you think! If you were around last year, this is the morning of the road trip that ends with our heroes witnessing the extrajudicial killing of a student by those Grays up near Gadsden.]
They wended their way east across the piney woods country of Alabama. The air, which had been too warm for February when they traveled west two days ago, turned pleasantly cool. Sun glinted on the pine needles. No one was keeping up the state highways, it seemed. The truck chugged along over pitted concrete.
Dorrie had been looking out the window, telling herself over and over, This is real, this is real, this is real.
Statius had been driving in silence.
After an hour he asked, “Dorrie?”
She looked around. As so often over the past three days, he surprised her — he was darker than she remembered, and the last vestiges of youthful softness were gone from his face. Not that he was ever really soft.
This is real, she tried to remind herself. At the same time she thought: Is this real?
She heard herself answering easily as she would have 15 years before, but in different words. She had remembered that slender, aloof little person, so stern with himself, who broke down in frantic sobs for a whole 30 seconds when she told him she was going away. “What is it, boy?” she asked.
At that he laughed. “Are we Wendy now?”
“No; Tink, because she loved him most.” Dorrie leaned her arm on the rolled-down window, her chin on her arm. She looked out the window. A doe and her fawn were feeding in a long, narrow meadow, just a strip of grass, really, between the highway and the forest. After a while she said, “She gave her life for him.”
The wind carried her words away.
Statius touched her shoulder. “That’s what I want to ask you, Dorrie. Why me?”
“What?” She looked around.
“Of all the people in this blighted country, I am the absolute last you should choose.” He couldn’t look at her but for a second, the road was so full of potholes. He repeated, eyes on the highway, “Why me?”
“Why did you choose me, then, if it comes to that?”
“I didn’t.” The truck bucked and he shifted down, as if they were on a mountain trail rather than a state highway. “I never would. I wouldn’t do that to anyone I cared about, not any more. But when you needed me, when you chose me, I was so glad.” He glanced over. Just as three days before, when he ran over the chicken in Memphis, Dorrie thought he was crying. But he was not crying; only his eyes were shining.
“But why?” she asked. “Why glad?”
“Because I had no one to talk to.”
Dorrie reached out and almost touched his face. Her fingers hesitated, as at a barrier. After a while she put just her fingertips against his cheekbone.
They rode like that for half a mile. He asked again, “Why me?”
Dorrie pulled her hand away, feeling something like gossamer stretch, then trail after. An invisible something, she thought. “True answer?” she asked.
“True answer.”
Dorrie unbuckled and sat with her back against the door, feet on the bench seat, to face him. “Because of your beautiful precious little feet.”
Silence. “Dorrie — you haven’t seen my feet in 15 years.”
“I did yesterday.”
“I was wearing socks.”
“All right, then, your wrist, see how it’s small and that bone there?” she pointed to his hand on the gearshift. “And then your hand is broad like that, because the extra muscle, and your forearm the same, these heavy, sharp-defined muscles — what sport did you play in college?”
“Gymnastics, you know I’m — I was — a gymnast, Dorrie.”
“I wanted to hear you say it. I love how you go straight to the present tense with that one.” She touched his wrist. “But see how these bird bones contrast with the — ”
“You’re describing a crush, not love.”
Dorrie sat up away from him. “If you didn’t want to hear my reasons, you shouldn’t have asked.”
“You don’t pine for 15 years for someone’s wrists, or their feet.”
“You may not. I do.”
He drove. Dorrie watched him for a while. “You aren’t exactly minding, this, are you?”
“It’s all very flattering. But — ”
“I could list a hundred similar reasons, and you’d find the same fault with all of them,” Dorrie said. “Men love women for their beauty and no one questions it. Why can’t I love you for yours?”
Between navigating the broken road he reached for the glove box. Dorrie pulled out the cigarettes and handed them to him.
“Because you’re building a house on sand, that’s why. Even if you’ve got a million grains of sand for the foundation, time and age will wash them all away.”
He lit a match, then a cigarette. He licked the match and tossed it out the window.
Dorrie wrapped her arms around her knees. “I don’t see how that doesn’t hurt, licking matches out.”
“The trick, William Potter — ”
“Yes, Major Lawrence, I know you’re superhuman.” Dorrie put the cigarettes back in the glove box. “And a showoff. There’s another reason for you. I love how you show off. I love how you don’t mind getting hurt. I love how you hurt yourself on purpose to show off how you don’t mind getting hurt. I also love how you’d rather burn your tongue than risk setting the pine woods on fire. All those reasons contained in three seconds.”
“Ah.”
“More than that, my love for you is infinite, which means even if the reasons were to drop off one by one — if, for example, you were to waste away like what’s-his-name in the story — ”
“Tithonus.”
“Tithonus, thank you, and my reasons for loving you were to disappear one by one with your beauty, I would still love you when there were no reasons left. Because reasons are finite and love is infinite.”
“But that means it’s arbitrary, right — reasonless?”
“Exactly. And in my defense, not that I should have to defend myself, that’s hardly without precedent. These things in themselves, beloved, may be changed, or changed for thee — ”
“ — and love so wrought may be unwrought so, yes. But why was I the arbitrary selection rather than someone safer to know, or at least less asinine?”
“I saw you, then I loved you,” Dorrie answered. “Then after that I immediately began noticing all the 10,000 reasons. But love was prior, and it was only for you, maybe arbitrarily, perhaps, but also specifically. So, you know, if I’d never seen you I’d never have loved anyone.”
“All right, then. What if I didn’t waste away?” He grinned at her. “What if I ate all the ice cream I could and got round as a pumpkin?”
Dorrie also laughed. “You wouldn’t do that, you’re too vain, you tape your waist every morning — do you still tape your waist every morning?”
“None of your business.” His eyes shone. “Anyhow, you’ll find out soon enough. I suppose I did ask for all this.”
“But that’s just it.” Dorrie’s hair whipped out the window behind her. “You’re the vainest man who ever stood up straighter to make sure he could look me in the eye. I think it has to do with morality more than looks, to be fair, though I’m not sure how — but you won’t let yourself slide, not an inch, not an ounce. You’re constantly fighting a rearguard action against, I dunno, entropy, modernity, despair, having a 28-inch waist instead of a 27-inch one.”
Her hair blew across her face and she brushed it away again.
“And there it is, everything, all of human frailty and vanity, all of human grandeur, in one tiny, exquisite person driving a beat-up truck through backwoods Alabama with not a soul in the world to care how big his exquisite little middle is.”
A long silence. Then Statius gasped with laughter, got the giggles and had to control himself lest he drive off the road.
Excellent.