She nodded, taking another look down at her arm. "You bet. It's not just all cute jazz music and a kid who can't kick a football. There's real existential stuff going on there."
"I guess I never thought of it that way." He took a quick glance around the room, and she noticed. Was he concerned about other people hearing their conversation? "So," he continued, "the tree represents... what? Aside from being fucking creepy, that is."
She laughed, possibly for the first time since she moved in. "Well, I don't know what Schulz intended, but here's what I think... Charlie Brown could have flown his kite anywhere, right? But he always did it right next to this thing." She pointed to the spot on her arm where he was looking, the ragged green blob atop a long, thin trunk, clearly a tree... but sporting a hugely wide, white-toothed grin. "And it ate his kite every single time. Now, when I was a kid, I would read the comics, and I'd be like, 'Just how stupid are you, Chuck? Why do you always try something right next to the one thing that you're sure is going to ruin it for you?'"
He nodded, amused, mulling it over while still keeping his eyes on her tattoo. "So, you think of it as a blind force of malevolence? A symbol of an uncaring universe, or maybe even one that actively hates us all?"
She waited until he raised his eyes to hers to respond. "That's the second thing I thought. But after that, I came to a third conclusion..." She leaned forward over the table, and he did too, as if she were drawing him into a conspiracy, their foreheads almost touching over the cheap mismatched china and silverware with edges rounded by tens of thousands of washings. "I think Charlie figured it out long ago. Not only is he aware that the tree is going to eat his kite... he secretly wants it to."
The age-furrows already prominent on the man's brow deepened even further, the shaggy, too-long eyebrows knitting. "Why would a kid want his kite to be destroyed?"
"Because," she said, feeling relieved instead of frustrated by the question, finally getting to explain it in detail to someone, "that's who he is. Think about it... what would happen to good ol' Charlie Brown if things suddenly started working out for him? If Lucy one day let him kick the football? Or his dog started treating him with respect? And good God, what if he finally got up the nerve to talk to that little red-haired girl?" She didn't care if he was only feigning interest, she was rolling now. "Failure defines who he is. Sure, he gets his little moments of triumph from time to time, but the other ninety-nine percent, he's the one who gets knocked down and called a blockhead. Everything that he understands about himself is set in this framework of being the universe's punching bag. And I came to understand that, not only does he get this, but he embraces it. He has accepted it as part of his identity."
The man mulled this over, nodding slowly, and the reaction made her happier than she had been in a long time. It had been so long since someone had taken her seriously. Finally, he straightened up and pointed at her arm for emphasis. "But it's the tree itself that you got as a tattoo. So now I'm wondering, why is *that* what you chose?"
"Let's make this interesting... and see if you can take a guess. Figure it out... and you can have my dessert."
His eyes met hers, flicked his gaze down to her rice pudding, and then he gave her an exaggerated squint, like a gunfighter in a spaghetti western. "*Now* this has gotten interesting," he murmured, and then turned his full attention back to her ink. Seeing the way he looked, as if he were really concentrating, made her want to bounce up and down in her chair and clap her hands like a little girl. She was loving this. Absolutely no one else was listening; everyone else was just shuffling around in their little cliques, stirring up petty dramas when they could be -- should be -- taking this time to compare lifetimes' worth of notes on the human condition.
He adjusted his bifocals and leaned in even closer, until she could feel his soft breath on her arm. It raised the lightest rash of goosebumps along her spine. Finally, he sat back. "It's a warning," he said confidently.
She nodded slowly, trying to pretend that he hadn't gotten it spot on. "You think so? How do you figure?"
He began to speak in a way that made her think that he had probably been a teacher at some point. A professor, maybe. "You picked that kite-eating tree knowing that you were going to see it every time you looked in the mirror," he said. "So what the tattoo is saying, is this: Don't be like Charlie. Don't sabotage yourself. Be aware of things that are going to keep you from succeeding, and stay away from them. So it's a reminder and a warning... for yourself."
"Pretty astute," she said, finally leaning back in her chair, giddy but kind of exhausted. She reached out, clapped her hand down over her miniature bowl of pudding, and was about to slide it across the table to him, when she stopped herself.
"What's the delay?" he asked, arching an eyebrow at her.
She slowly drew the pudding back toward herself. "Give me a chance to win my dessert back. Let's see some of *your* ink, and then let me try to figure it out."
He looked at her warily across the dining table. She noted how his breath ruffled the gray of his minimally-groomed mustache, as if she had suddenly made him nervous. Hit a nerve, had she? The goosebumps intensified.
He lifted an arm, started to unfasten the cuff of his right sleeve. It was a light blue button-down Oxford, and as he rolled it up, long shaded expanses of the dark skin of his arm came into view. So he had a sleeve much like hers, she mused, just as faded from at least as many long years of living. She loved how the bright colors of an exposed tropical flower on his wrist popped against the background, seeming to radiate from deep within his skin. But he moved with no hesitation now; this wasn't what her request had initially made him think about, and she thought she knew why.
"That's lovely," she said, gesturing to the flower, "but that's not the one I want to see."
He froze, caught in her headlights. She reached up and tapped on her own arm, the one closest to him, signifying his left arm, as if she were a mirror image of him. "That one... what's that?"
He looked down at his bicep, then realized that he could see what she saw through the light material of the shirt: a small dot of neon red, just barely visible through the weave.
"I..." he began. "I don't..." He stopped speaking, but kept looking at that one little spot, just as she did.
I've hit on something, she thought. Better tread lightly now. Don't scare him off. She spoke after a moment of silence, her voice small as she could make it. "Could I please see that one?"
He was still considering. Whatever it was that was making him hesitant, it ran deep. And the fact that she could guess at what sort of tattoos caused that reaction made her want to see it even more, the fear that she was about lose the one person she had felt comfortable talking to her even sharper.
He looked up at her finally, his large brown eyes searching hers as if to say, can I really trust you? She could almost feel it when his attitude shifted. He flipped down the cuff he had started to roll up, and started to actually unbutton his shirt. Right there in the dining hall. She had to restrain herself from squealing in excitement.
He paid no attention to anyone around them, and although she grew aware that there were a few passerby who paused, wondering why this man was taking off his shirt during dinner, she remained focused only on him. Let them look; she knew that if any one of them were to roll up their own sleeves, there would be nothing there but old, spotted skin.
He leaned forward, working his arms out of the sleeves, and she noted that he still had some muscles on him despite his age, evident under the sleeveless undershirt. When he had fully gotten free of the button-down, he draped it over the arm of his chair and plunked his elbow down on the table next to her, as if he were ready to arm-wrestle.
She was suddenly presented with the red dot she had glimpsed through the fabric, and found it to be the eye of a crow, blazing with what looked like reflected firelight. It was the only bit of color in the portrait of the bird, the rest of it about the size of her hand, portrayed in jet-black ink.
It took her a few moments to realize the context of the bird and what it was doing, not just because of complexity of the image, but because of the way it almost seemed to hide against the darkness of the background. He seemed content to let her look at it as long as she liked. The bird had turned its head around and was plucking at something clinging to its wing, which eventually revealed itself to be a cluster of bandages. The bird's beak was tugging at them, in the process of unravelling them. The other wing, extended to its full length, appeared to have just shaken off the last of these wrappings, which it had done so enthusiastically that the folded, twisting gauze fluttered up and around the bird, still present but no longer binding it.
"What do you see?" he asked. His tone seemed to convey that he was second-guessing his choice to expose this piece of himself to her.
She thought carefully, scanning the entire image at once to make sure she was processing it correctly. She began to just articulate her thoughts as they came to her, unfiltered: "Hm. I don't know if it's a crow, or a raven... It's been injured, but now it's healed, it's getting ready to fly again..." Then, in one of those rare mental moments when everything lines up, she suddenly got it. "Oh, it's a blackbird!"
The slightest beginning of a smile broke at the corner of her new friend's mouth. She kept talking, unable to stop: ""My grandma played Beatles songs all the time." She sighed with the endorphin flood of mingled relief and nostalgia. "The 'Paul songs' were her favorite. That's what she used to call them. She thought John was too weird for his own good, so my first act of rebellion was to fall in love with those instead, and argue endlessly with her about them."
The man listened to her patiently. He shifted a little in his seat, and the movement made the bird's feathers ripple a little bit, as if in a slight wind, drawing her attention back to its blazing eye. Taking a quick think through the lyrics of "Blackbird", she found herself recalling hopeful words, not something that would seem so, well, *dire* as what she was looking at.
"But there's something more," she mused, not yet looking up at him for confirmation one way or the other. "Something more significant than just a recovery." She looked more closely at the wrappings above the bird, which looked as if they were being whipped around, either by the animal's thrashings to be free of them, or a wind that had picked up. The more she looked, the more their random crossings and loops started to look markedly less so. Numbers? Maybe Roman numerals...
Then their significance snapped into place. "The date. I know that date..." With dawning horror in her eyes, she turned her eyes to his. "Were you there?"
His eyes filled with emotion as he realized that she had figured out what his tattoo meant. "No," he said. "My wife was."
She nodded. The air around them had suddenly changed, although not in any tangible way. It was still just as filled with clinks of dinnerware and chatter as it always was, but the understanding that passed between them seemed to have its own particular weight. "Did..." she began, unsure of how to proceed. "Did she survive the attack?"
She felt a wave of relief when he nodded. "Not easily," he said, "but, thankfully, yes. She was one of the lucky ones, but still had multiple injuries. There was... a very long recovery period." She could feel him wanting to tell her, to divulge every last, horrific detail, but holding himself back. She hoped that one day, given enough time, he would allow her to hear about it all.
She felt like she was continuing his words when she said, "So you got this tattoo when it was all over. That's why the blackbird is unraveling the wrappings that spell out the date. She finally learned to fly again."
And now tears, absent when speaking about her injury, filled his eyes as he spoke about what came after. "We had another good eighteen years after that."
Then she leaned forward and wrapped her hand around his arm, her thumb coming to rest alongside the blazing eye of the bird on his arm. "I bet that she thought the very same thing."
And for just a moment, they were merely two old people in an assisted living community, sharing pieces of their pasts, pieces they felt so deeply that they had no choice but to etch them into their bodies. They were alone in a full dining room, among people who had maybe forgotten their earlier lives, or had walled them off behind defenses, instead of making them manifest in inked skin, ever-present reminders and declarations and signposts and warnings. They had lives full of stories to tell each other and all the time in the world, never mind how short that might actually turn out to be.
His face had softened by the time he looked directly into her eyes again, and this time he reached out and tapped a spot on her inner forearm, an elephant's head with its trunk triumphantly raised, as if issuing a blast of hot savannah air.
"Now tell me about this one," he said.
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