by Wally Lamb
“Being open to new experiences is what will keep us alive,” he murmured to me afterwards, on the verge of his sleep. “I could tell you liked that just now, felt the exact second you relaxed and went with it. You telegraphed your enjoyment right to me—put me on fire!”
His whispering voice was moist against my ear.
The next day I drove the van for the first time. The ride was smoother than our Volkswagen and the seats were up so high, I felt like I was levitating. The body-shop man said the dent would cost $375 to fix; I told him we needed it done before we left. I walked to the bank and withdrew two hundred more dollars. For Dante, I bought two pairs of shorts, two T-shirts, all seven volumes of the Mobil Travel Guide, and a leather-bound journal for his poems. I got myself a new pair of clogs and, at the drugstore, renewed my birth-control prescription.
“Anything else?” the register clerk said.
I slid the tube of first-aid cream across the counter at her. I’d had rectal bleeding that morning.
* * *
If you looked quickly at our three-inch stack of cross-country pictures (ten rolls’ worth, developed free of charge at the photo lab back in Rhode Island), you’d swear Dante and I had had a wonderful time—that his plan to ignite our marriage like a camp stove had worked.
Most of the shots are of Dante, posed in the lower right half of the picture with Mt. Rushmore or the Wall Drug sign or the Magic Kingdom just over his shoulder. Even when he was in one of his moods, he transformed himself for pictures, breaking into a self-assured, Robert Wagner kind of half smile, so that what got developed was the illusion that he was content. Out of the hundreds of shots, there was one truthful picture: one of me by myself, standing in the hot-springs steam at Yellowstone Park, leaning my arm against a wooden sign that says “Dangerous Thermal Area” and looking weary and scared. All the other photos Dante took of me were ambushes: one of me getting surprised inside the camp shower, another where I’m sleeping on the van floor with my tongue out, vulnerable as a dead woman. “Bam! I got you!” Dante would say whenever he took a shot. If I was going to take his picture, he’d borrow my hairbrush first.
The photographs don’t say how lonely I was, sitting up front, driving the van through whole states while Dante sat cross-legged, snickering at some book, some private joke between him and an author. Or writing out his private thoughts, his black Flair pen squeaking along on the oversized pages of the leather-bound journal. It was thinking about distances that made me so lonely—how Nebraska went on forever one day, how far away I was from Grandma and from Grandma’s idea of what my life was like. Looking from a distance at those purple Bighorn Mountains made me wonder about God again: if he was real, if he was too far away to matter. For whole days on that trip, Dante, sitting beside me, was as distant as those mountains.
“You’re trapped by your own lies is what it is,” I told myself in the rearview mirror one twilight. “Gracewood, Kippy, how you got pregnant with Vita Marie—that whole rat’s nest of secrets.” We were parked in a supermarket lot someplace in California and Dante was on his way inside for groceries. I watched the automatic doors close behind him. “You’ve got all that distance because you’ve never been honest with him—not once, not since before you even met him.”
He usually slid his journal under the seat when he wasn’t writing in it, but this time he’d forgotten to put it away. There it sat, within easy reaching distance. Between the leather covers might be his real thoughts: why he got so angry, why he’d married me, what he felt. I could see him in the store, wheeling his cart. It would be easy.
I shook with the choice I gave myself: I could be the same girl sitting in that empty classroom back at St. Anthony’s School, undoing the clasp on Miss Lilly’s pocketbook—the fat, wrecked girl locked in the toilet stall at Hooten Hall, prying the flap off Dante’s stolen letters. Or somebody else. Somebody better. The person Dr. Shaw and I had started but never finished.
I looked in at Dante, fourth or fifth back in a line of customers, two thicknesses of plate glass away. I scraped an emery board across my fingernails. Listened to my breathing. Left the journal unread.
24
There were miracles on the road.
At a snack bar at the top of Pike’s Peak, I asked for real milk, not powdered, for my coffee. The waitress said they couldn’t keep real milk on the top of the mountain, that it went bad—something about the altitude.
“Isn’t that odd?” a woman said to me. She was at the table next to us, she and her husband. “About the milk? I ordered the exact same thing a minute ago. I couldn’t help overhearing.”
Anyone but me up there on that mountain would have just looked over and seen an ordinary, friendly tourist couple. But it wasn’t anyone else. It was me, looking right directly at my coffin-picture people, Mr. and Mrs. J. J. Fickett from Tepid, Missouri. I even recognized Mrs. Fickett’s polka-dot halter top; she’d worn it in one of their series I’d developed. It was a powerful moment for me, one of the most powerful moments of my life if I’d chosen to use it. “Why, Mr. and Mrs. Fickett,” I could have said. “Have you been taking any more of your casket pictures lately?” They would have probably run screaming right off the mountain. Of course, I didn’t. I didn’t say a word, not even to Dante. How could I?
Vita Marie would have passed her first birthday while we were on the road. One early morning, in a campground shower stall, I closed my eyes and saw her, heard her—so vividly, it felt like a visit. She was plain and real and had my eyes: a chubby, brown-haired little thing in red corduroy overalls. I felt the ribbing of the material, smelled her smell. She took a step, then ka-boomed backward to the floor, sitting in her own surprise. I closed my eyes against the spray and leaned to the wall, laughing out loud. Who’d sent me this gift? Ma? God? Vita Marie herself?
On the return route through New Mexico and Arkansas and Tennessee, I only half noticed what was around me; I was more interested in what was ahead. I’d start up our house fund again, I decided, as soon as we paid off the trip bills. Dante and I might have our own home by 1981 or ’82, and maybe a baby by the following year. Now that this trip was out of his system. Now that school was starting up again.
Dear Grandma,
I can’t believe I’ve gotten to see so much of the country. Remember back in high school when I was scared to even leave my bedroom? There’s more to tell you about our trip than I can fit on a postcard. We’re planning a visit this fall. I’ll bring all our pictures! Dante and I are fine and happy. Love, D.
Driving past the “New England and East” sign, Dante sighed and said he’d be glad to get home over with.
“That’s a strange way of putting it,” I said. His jaw locked and his hands tightened around the wheel.
We got back to Montpelier in late afternoon. The downtown streets were steamy and slick from a shower we’d just missed. Even shut up for three weeks, the apartment smelled good to me. I grabbed Dante as he walked in with our suitcases. “I love you, honey,” I said, squeezing him tight. “Thank you for our trip.”
“Too bad we’re not still on it,” he said.
Afterward, I sat sifting through old mail and newspapers and back-to-school circulars. “Well,” I said. “Eight more days for you and two more for me and we’re back to the grind.”
“Yup,” he said.
Then he snatched the keys to the van and disappeared until midnight.
That was the first hint that Dante was keeping secrets, too. Well, one secret—one big one that was already a whole summer old.
* * *
“I guess I better tell you,” he said. I had just come back from shopping for his back-to-school clothes. He was standing next to me, not taking the bag with his two new shirts in it.
“Tell me what?”
“I lost my job.”
“Lost it?” I sat down, the wind knocked out. “What do you mean?”
“They fired me. In June.”
“In June? . . . Why didn’t you . . . What’s going
on?”
He sat down and put his hands to his face. “Ev Downs and his vigilante committee. They got me.”
“Dante, I still don’t—”
“I said it all along, remember? That he’d get me if he ever got a chance.” With his arm, he smeared the tears across his face. “I wanted to just drive us away, to protect you from all the gossip—from that fishbowl where you work. But I’m exhausted from keeping it in. It fucked up the whole trip.”
I took his hand and squeezed it to stop my own shaking. “Okay,” I said. “Okay.” I was taking deep breaths. “Gossip about what?”
“There’s this kid, Sheila, all right? A student in my American lit class two years ago. She was a senior this past year. Used to come around to talk about her problems, that kind of thing. So the last day of school, I’m sitting at my desk correcting exams and she comes into my room. It must have been three-thirty, quarter of four. I thought I was the only one in the building. She said she wanted to talk to me. Boyfriend problems—she was confused. So we went for a ride out to Barre, to the quarry.”
“Just the two of you?”
“I was tired of correcting,” he said. “I needed to get out of that building. It was just to talk.”
“Then what happened?”
He looked up at me. “What happened?” he repeated. “Well, whose version do you want—mine or the PTA cunt who decided to ‘come forward’ a week after the fact about what she saw?” He laughed bitterly. “Did I say fact just then? I meant fiction.”
I wanted us to be in the van, a thousand miles away from what I was hearing. “What did she tell them, Dante?”
“Let’s just say I’m accused of breaching the sacred trust.”
“Dante, skip the fancy vocabulary and—”
“Kissing her. Feeling her tits. According to this bitch, we had quite a time out there.”
He started to cry. “I swear to God, Dolores, we were just out there. I never so much as touched the tip of her sleeve.”
I thought I could hear the truth in his quivering voice. We were both in tears.
“Hastings and my good buddy Ev called me into school the first week of vacation. Introduced me to the Board of Ed’s attorney—this mutant asshole who looked like he just stepped off the set of Deliverance. They gave me two choices: a statutory rape charge or clean out my desk.”
“But why didn’t you just tell me, Dante? Maybe I could have—”
“Could have what?” he said. “Overcharged one of my accusers down at the fucking Grand Union? Thrown their canned goods in the bag on top of the tomatoes? You realize what a public hearing would be like? How much fun it would be to see me skewered on the front page of the fucking Times-Argus? I didn’t tell you because I wanted to protect you from it. And because . . . because I thought you’d believe—” Now his crying came out as weird, strangled gulping. I sat down and hugged him, rocked myself against him. “We’ll fight it,” I said.
“They had me by the balls. I’m gone. I’m out of there.”
“But Dante, they can’t just accept someone else’s word without letting you defend yourself. What about the girl? Don’t they believe her?”
“Who, Sheila? Sheila can’t tell the difference between wishful thinking and reality. Sheila is officially ‘confused’ about what went on.”
“I’ll help you fight it, Dante. Well get a good lawyer and—”
“You want to help?” he said. “Just stay out of it. Just let it alone—that’s how you can help. Take the fucking shirts back and get your goddamned refund. I’ve already talked to a lawyer; he says I might as well hang it up.”
“Why?”
“Just . . . just drop it.”
“But what are you going to do?”
“Take a rest for a while—get my shit together. Then, I don’t know—I guess I’ll look for another job.”
“Yeah, but that’s exactly why you need to clear this up, honey. No school is going to hire you if they think—”
‘They won’t know about it. That was part of the deal they cut me.”
“What deal?”
“If I left quietly, didn’t go to the union or anything, it wouldn’t go on my record. No mess, no publicity.”
“But they’re forcing you to say it was true!”
“It’s the way I want to do it.”
“Dante, you’re not thinking clearly. I mean, here you are out of a job and we go off and spend all that money on—”
“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “You’re too much.”
“Well, Dante, what happens if you don’t get another job right away? The payments on the van alone are—”
“Do me a favor, will you? Just shut up. Go fuck yourself.”
Dear Grandma,
You mentioned in your last letter that you almost forgot what I look like, so I’m sending you this picture of Dante and me taken on our wedding day. (A friend of ours decoupaged it for us.) Maybe you can put it up on the stair wall with the other family pictures.
I promise we’ll get down for a visit sometime before the fall is over, Grandma, but right now we’re both so busy! I have this nice idea for when we do visit. Why don’t you and I drive down to the beach and take a little walk? It’s pretty down there this time of the year, after all the crowds clear out. We’d have the whole beach to ourselves. Dante and I will probably have to come down on a Sunday and leave that same night because I got a second job waitressing Friday and Saturday nights at the Lobster Pot (the place where we got married). They were able to juggle my schedule at the grocery store so I could swing both. It’s a little hectic, but I don’t mind. Whenever I get overtired, I just concentrate on the house Dante and I are saving for. One bad thing about being on my feet is that I’m getting varicose veins. Didn’t Ma have them, too?
Oh, by the way, did I mention that Dante was taking a leave of absence from teaching for a little while? He wants to spend some time writing poetry. (He’s very talented.) I got new curtains for the kitchen—yellow Priscillas. They look nice, except I hemmed them too short by about an inch. Oh, well—live with your mistakes, right?
Love, Dolores
Dante’s plan was to get his head together until springtime or so by writing poetry and reading his way through a list of classics he’d always meant to get to. He began sending his poems to magazines with freaky-sounding names. Each rejection slip they sent him shut him down for days. His reading program stalled early on when he couldn’t get through Montaigne’s Essays, but he refused to leapfrog to the next book.
If I didn’t dillydally at the store on Friday afternoons when my shift was over, I had just enough time to vacuum and pick up before rushing down to the Lobster Pot in time for my setups. Dante meant to keep up with the housework, but he was suffering on and off from writer’s block, he said, and couldn’t create a proper internal environment if he had to worry about Tidy-Bowling the toilet. He said he would have thought someone who’d been a watercolor artist herself could sympathize about the creative process—that next time around, he’d look for a wife who wasn’t anal-retentive. I shut my mouth and cleaned.
“So how was work today?” he always asked me, lying on the bed, stretching from his afternoon nap. He’d begun to be hungry for details about my coworkers, who he called “the mental midgets.” After a while I withheld news; it felt like I was feeding him their lives.
“Oh, nothing much. How was your day?”
He followed me into the bathroom, peeling a banana. “Depressing. I was just cranking up on a new poem when some dipshit called, trying to sell us a storage freezer. Writing is a lot like dreaming, you know? There’s a subconscious connection. Once someone intrudes, it’s like trying to go back to sleep to finish your dream.” He yawned so wide I saw the chewed-up banana.
At the sink, I scratched at a salad-dressing stain that was still in my waitress uniform. “I see you didn’t get a chance to go to the laundromat after all, huh?”
He watched me with contempt while I climbed into my uniform, towel
dabbed at the wet spot, struggled with the back zipper. “You know what I find depressing?” he said. “Your love of whatever’s perfunctory. Your deep respect for the mundane.”
I told him I was late. He followed me out to the van. When I opened the door, he slammed it shut again.
“Dante, I’m late.”
“Oh, excuse me, great important one. May I ask just one quick question? Why is it that every time I talk to you, I get more depressed?”
“I’m sorry, Dante. I’m trying. We’ll talk about it.”
“Whoopie,” he scoffed. “Something to look forward to all evening.”
“Look, you said you didn’t want to fight back when they accused you. Okay—I would’ve if it was me, but I respected your decision. Only now you’re always fighting me instead. It’s just not fair.”
His eyes welled up; he went back in the house. I looked at my watch, got in and started up the van, then cut the motor again.
I sat down on the bed next to him. “Dante,” I said. “I know this is hard for you, honest to God. We can talk later, but right now I really have to go. If I’m not there to do setups, then Myrna—”
“So go.”
I kissed his forehead and stood up, straightening myself. “I feel so ugly in this uniform,” I said. “Do I look okay?”
He answered without looking. “You’re a vision in blue nylon,” he said. “A frigging goddess in wedgies.”
* * *
In November, Dante cut off his beard and began a daily ritual that included crossword puzzles and word scrambles. I was pretty sure he was into the soaps, too. Sometimes when I’d come home from work, the TV was warm and once I caught him humming the theme song to “Days of Our Lives.” In spite of his vegetarianism, he won us a free Thanksgiving turkey from the radio station for knowing who’d recorded the song “Cool Jerk.” But when I suggested we drive down to Grandma’s with it, he said he’d prefer not to spend the holiday “as traditionally as the fucking Waltons.”