Days

by Mary Robison

  “Here’s the big plan,” Hoyt said. “My father told me the only things you got to worry about are sex, death, and taxes. And he told me, but if you’ve got the right family, you’ll never have to worry.”

  Independence Day

  HELEN HAD NOT DONE ANYTHING all June. She did not have to. Nothing was required of her. Her estranged husband was in Detroit somewhere. Her retired father was housing her in a grand stone house in Port Brent, a lakeside resort town in northern Ohio. The house was on a cove and the backyard led to a private pier where Helen’s father moored his boats, an old wooden Chris-Craft with an Evinrude engine, and a Lido sailboat.

  It was not good for Helen, having nothing to do. If you didn’t do things to your life, she decided, it would begin doing things to you. She decided this while lying in bed at four-thirty in the morning. She was looking at her knees, and, as if to confirm her thought, she heard a clunk sound that she recognized as the air conditioner breaking down.

  She turned onto her side.

  SHE WOKE UP SWEATING AT one o’clock the next afternoon, and stepped into some beach thongs and a sundress. It was almost a hundred degrees in her third-story room.

  Down in the kitchen, her sister, Darla, who was twenty-five, had her elbows splayed on the open morning newspaper; she was reading Maggie and Jiggs.

  Helen peeled an orange over the kitchen counter and considered her sister, who was sweating, too, in an immodest calico bikini. Darla snorted a laugh through her nose at the paper, then raised her eyes to stare at a hose that connected the dishwashing machine.

  Darla had a cottage somewhere on the lake, but she was an in-and-out visitor at the Kenning house. Since May, she had been mostly an “in” visitor, as she was low on money and boyfriends.

  “Where’s Father?” Helen said.

  Darla nodded toward a backfiring engine noise out the window.

  Helen lifted herself on her toes and looked through the double windows over the sink. She saw her father on his riding mower, in the west stretch of the lawn. He and the mower were bounding over the crest of a little slope.

  Helen said, “Why isn’t he fixing the air conditioner? Why is he mowing the lawn?”

  Darla shrugged, studying the washing instructions on the inside of her swimsuit’s bra cup.

  “I’m getting sick,” Helen said. “I’m going to get Father.”

  “Terry called,” Darla said. She moved a butter plate and some juice glasses around on the table so she could roll the paper over.

  Terry, Helen’s husband, had been calling from Detroit five times a day. Helen refused to talk to him because he usually had only one point to make, and that was that she should clear out of her father’s place and get her own apartment.

  She walked around the counter to the windowed aluminum door that led onto the patio and yard. Art Kenning had U-turned his mower and was charging for the house.

  He eased the machine onto the patio’s gravel apron. A pebble flew from the grass blower and stabbed the side of a wooden toolbox that was on the ground. “I thought that was a bullet,” Mr. Kenning said, staring at the chip of stone. He said, “Your husband called this morning.”

  “What’s wrong with the air conditioner?” Helen said, over the idling of the engine. “Can’t you fix it?”

  “No,” Mr. Kenning said, and sighed. “You’ll have to live, without it.”

  “I can’t live without it,” Helen said.

  “I’ll look at it,” Mr. Kenning said. “But I’m leaving in fifteen minutes. Where’s your sister?”

  “Inside,” Helen said.

  Her father stopped the engine and leaned back on the mower’s saddle. He brought his feet up one by one and removed his shoes and socks. He stuffed the socks into the shoes and climbed down and picked his way, barefooted, over the gravel.

  Helen followed him back into the kitchen, and they stood looking at Darla and the pattern on the tablecloth for a minute.

  “This is Communism,” Darla said, rapping a column in her newspaper. “I think we whipped the wrong damn army.”

  Mr. Kenning said, “You know, girls, this is a workday for most people.”

  “Tomorrow’s Fourth of July,” Darla said. “Not a workday. So you’d better get a repairman out here.” She wet the tip of her finger and turned a newspaper page. “Helen, get me a Coke while you’re over there.”

  “Watch the handle on the refrigerator,” Mr. Kenning said. “It’s falling off.”

  HELEN SWAM IN THE COVE.

  She and Darla rode the house bike, an old Schwinn, along the beach road. Helen pedaled, standing, while Darla sat on the bike’s narrow seat with her pelvis thrust forward, her legs dangling, a cigarette in her hand.

  After they swam, they lay side-by-side in the sun on the dock, their hair wrapped in colored towels.

  “What are you writing?” Darla said, with her eyes closed. “I hear you writing.”

  “A book of days,” Helen said. She had a sheaf of papers in a folder that she had brought along in the bike basket. She was flipping through the papers. She paused and scribbled with a red Flair pen.

  “About Terry?” Darla said.

  “Why would I write about Terry?”

  “I don’t know,” Darla said. “What else have you got to write about? You don’t date. You don’t work. A book of days is supposed to be autobiography—about things happening. What’s been happening to you?”

  “I’ve got plenty in my life besides Terry,” Helen said, but after a while she closed the folder, which contained mostly notes on movies and TV shows she had seen.

  Helen swam again in the early evening. She brushed her wet blond hair into a spike and put on the same sundress. She walked a quarter mile of shady road through the resort town of Port Brent. On the edge of the town was a lounge Helen liked that was called—from what Helen could gather from the pink neon sign that marked the place—Seafood Liquor.

  The lights in the lounge flickered on as she entered, although it was only six o’clock. She passed a line of men at the bar who were watching a trunk-sized color television that showed a horse race. She passed the little placard on a stand that read: “Please wait to be seated,” and went to her usual booth, in the rear, under a stuffed, board-mounted, varnished lobster.

  “Double White Horse, neat,” Helen said when the waitress came.

  The waitress, a big-boned pretty girl in the gingham house uniform, brought the drink right away, on a round tray with a cork mat and a book of paper matches.

  Helen’s Detroit husband, Terry, came into the bar. He went to Helen’s booth. He lay on the bench seat across from her, with his legs up and crossed at the knee.

  “It’s Crayola at the clubhouse turn,” said the TV announcer. “Crayola by a length.”

  The men along the bar cheered and punched each other, pulled each other’s clothing, rearranged their standing and seating positions.

  “I suppose it means something that you can always find me,” Helen said to her husband.

  Terry put a hand under his dark glasses and rubbed his eyes. “No. It just means you always go to the same places.”

  The pretty waitress brought Terry a menu, and he said, “No. I don’t need it. The Bosun’s platter and two of those.” He pointed at Helen’s drink.

  “When did you drive down from Detroit?” Helen said. “It’s a horrible drive, I know. I’ve done it.”

  “Have you?”

  “Once,” Helen said.

  Terry said, “I had to come down because you never answer the phone. You know how many times I’ve called?”

  “I know. I’m sorry,” Helen said. “It’s just that so many times I pick up the phone and the caller hangs up, or asks, ‘Who is this?’ To me!”

  “That’s nuts,” Terry said. “That isn’t the real reason. You don’t come to the phone because you don’t want to talk about what I want to talk about.”

  “You do kind of play the same violin, Terry.”

  “Well, I’ve got a different
violin,” he said. “I need to talk to you.” He settled his dark glasses back on his face. “Something good’s happened.”

  “Yes?” Helen said.

  “Silly Brat. Silly Brat. Blinko and Silly Brat at the rail,” said the TV.

  “It’s my birthday,” Terry said. “I’m thirty-three.”

  “Oh, God. It is. I forgot all about it,” Helen said. “July third, of course. I’m so sorry. Is that what you’ve been calling about?”

  He looked sourly at Helen, and took her drink and finished it.

  “Something very nice has happened,” he said.

  “You got a job,” Helen said.

  “Never mind,” Terry said. “Thank you,” he told the waitress, who put two wide full glasses and some napkins on the table.

  “I won the state lottery,” he said. “Legally. I won twelve thousand dollars on a ticket I bought in Euclid.”

  Helen said, “You really did?” and Terry began to nod with his lower lip fastened by his upper teeth. “That’s incredible. That’s wonderful. That is good news. Congratulations. I should say so.”

  “Yep,” he said. “But there’s an angle. There’s a strong possibility I’ll win a lot more, Helen. I’m likely to come out of this a millionaire.”

  “How?” she said. “This is remarkable. You!”

  “Friday,” he said. “There’s another drawing, between me and some other people—five of them—and one of us gets the million dollars.”

  “Jesus,” Helen said.

  “Yeah, really,” Terry said. “But don’t worry. I’ll win.”

  “You probably will,” Helen said. “Whew!”

  “Anyway,” Terry said, “I’m going to give you some money. Whether I win more or not. I want you to move out of your dad’s house.”

  “Oh, no,” Helen said. “Same old violin.”

  “I want you to move,” Terry said.

  “I’m fine there,” Helen said.

  “I want you to get your own apartment,” Terry said. “You’ve never spent a single night alone in your whole life. You don’t know the first thing about just day-to-day getting by—earning money.”

  “Why would I want to spend a night alone? My father has plenty of money.”

  “I want you to move,” Terry said.

  “I’m fine where I am,” Helen said.

  “Yes, but, Helen,” he said. “Okay,” he said. “When I win the million dollars, I’ll just buy the place.”

  “You can’t buy the place,” Helen said. “It’s our home. My father has boats there. It’s where I was raised. My mother died there, in the laundry room.”

  “She had a stroke in the laundry room. She died in a hospital,” Terry said. “I’ll buy it, and kick you out. I’ll evict you.”

  The waitress brought him a small porcelain plate with a powdered dinner roll and a tablet of butter between waxed-paper squares. On a larger plate was a bowl of salad.

  “I’ll need cutlery,” Terry said to her.

  “Sorry?” the waitress said.

  “Oh,” Terry said, “skip it. I’ll eat this junk with my fingers.”

  He picked up some chunks of lettuce and wedged them into his mouth.

  THERE WAS A MOTORIST’S INN, a circle of shingle-roofed, paint-blistered buildings around a blacktop court, where Terry had taken a cabin. Helen woke up there, on the morning of the Fourth of July, to a local explosion. The room was queerly lit. One tall ceramic lamp, smoothly sculpted into a seahorse shape, threw the illumination from a low-wattage light bulb onto a wall of cheap paneling, and there was a tiny window with white drapes. The room smelled faintly of gunpowder and of the refrigerated air that blew from the air conditioner.

  Terry had left the TV on and from her pillow Helen watched about ten minutes of an Abbott and Costello movie.

  She stretched and got out of bed. She put on her sundress and stepped out the door. The sky was white. There was a yard with some playground equipment behind the circle of cabins. It was hot, and Helen spotted Terry, shirtless, with some young boys. Terry was supervising the firing off of cherry bombs, Chinese twisters, sparklers, paper tubes that foamed and smoked and boomed.

  The neighborhood dogs were barking. Terry shaded his eyes. “You’re up,” he said to Helen. “Good morning.”

  “How could I help being up?” she said. She went back inside and tried to fix her hair with a tin comb from her handbag. The only mirror in the cabin was over the bathroom sink and it was missing big chips of silvered surface. Helen bent at the knees to fit her face between two flaked-off, black sections.

  Terry came up behind her. There was a boom from outside the cabin. It shook the single window in its mounting.

  “Did you leave your fireworks with those kids?” Helen said. “They’ll blast off their thumbs and you’ll spend your twelve thousand on some lawsuit.”

  “They aren’t my thumbs,” Terry said.

  TERRY TOOK HELEN TO THE Port Brent parade. They sat on the courthouse lawn, near the curb, and watched the floats and the high-school band pass by. A man on ten-foot stilts in an Uncle Sam outfit stalked over them. Helen waved up at him.

  “How are you today, darling?” the man said. His face, under the tall striped hat, was tiny.

  Darla, Helen’s sister, was in the parade, in a beige Ford that was part of the automobile show. She looked sad and pale, perched on the hood of the car.

  “She was dreading this,” Terry said.

  “Who was?” Helen said.

  “Darla. She was dreading this. Your father made her do it, I guess,” Terry said.

  “How would you know?” Helen said.

  “I talk to Darla,” Terry said. “Whenever you don’t answer. I’ve talked to her a lot about her life.”

  “Have you? And what else?” Helen said. She had trouble holding a match still to light a cigarette.

  “I came down to see her once. Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

  “No, it’s all right, I guess,” Helen said. “So you want to buy my father’s house?”

  “If he wants me to,” Terry said. “I get the impression he does. He doesn’t want the responsibility for the place anymore. But I don’t mind the responsibility. I’ll buy it up and kick you out.”

  “All right,” Helen said.

  Heart

  ROY HAD HIS NICE SHOES propped on the next bleacher seat. His cap drooped over his ear. He was staring up into a cloudy wreath of overhead lighting. The cigarette filter between his fingers began to burn.

  A young man on a seat ahead of Roy hunched forward, calling instructions through a bottomless cardboard cup to a girl on the ice rink. The girl was skating to a recording of Slaughter on Tenth Avenue. She wore a yellow leotard and dark stockings, and her hair was in ducktails.

  Roy stamped out his cigarette end. A fat boy climbed on the deep stairs in the aisle. The boy cocked his mouth open and used a finger to jiggle a loose front tooth.

  Roy lit his last cigarette and watched the girl skating. She glided to a near low wall, turned her feet sideways, and stopped. Her yellow leotard was wet, creased sharply above her thighs. She put her hands on her hips. She was having trouble breathing.

  “Want to pack it in?” said the young man with the cup.

  The girl nodded, swiveled her skates, and then went backward to a card table, which held up a portable record player. She lifted the needle arm.

  “Alley oop,” the young man called. “We don’t mention those choppy turns,” he said to Roy. “We’re just here for the fun of it.”

  “I wouldn’t know the difference,” Roy said. “It looks so good.”

  Across the rink, the girl was hobbling on her skate blades along a strip of carpeting, toward a dressing locker.

  “I used to see you skate together,” Roy said.

  “Where?” the young man said. He looked pleased. “Here?”

  “That’s right,” Roy said.

  “We used to practice together. We had some routines. I’ve got a little swelling in m
y knee.” The young man tapped his right leg.

  “Let’s go look at the gray coat, can we?” the girl yelled from the far side of the rink.

  “Let’s go buy it for you,” the young man yelled back.

  ROY CIRCLED THE BIG BUILDING on foot. He saw the fat boy with the loose tooth standing with a girl. The girl was a little older, taller than the boy. Her arm was twisted behind her back and pinned there by the fat boy’s left hand. With his right hand, he was socking her on the shoulders and neck. It was August and dry and hot. But they were fighting in a six-foot cone of snow—scrapings from the rink.

  Roy stopped walking and crossed his arms. The fat boy stepped away from the girl. He stretched his throat and looked sideways at Roy. The girl coughed.

  Roy leaned against a wall. “Why hit her?” he said. “She’s too pretty to hit.” Out in the sun, in the snow, the two children looked Oriental. They had black hair and creamy brown skin. They stared at Roy in the flat green heat. Their black eyes were narrowed. The girl’s mouth was open, her lower lip jutting.

  “You speak English. Am I right?” Roy said.

  The girl looked at the fat boy.

  “English?” Roy said.

  “We’ve never been outside this country,” the boy said.

  “My uncle was born here. I’m Frank Henderson.”

  “Why were you hitting her?” Roy said.

  “She’s my sister,” Frank Henderson said.

  The girl was rubbing her shoulder. Roy said to her, “He was hitting you.”

  “He’s not a little gentleman,” the girl said. She spoke with her face pointed at her running shoes.

  Frank Henderson tipped over and used his hands to scoop snow. He wadded and packed an ice ball.

  The girl raised an arm and covered her head. “If you do,” she said.

  “Here you go,” Roy said, moving off the wall. He made a mitt with his hands. “Right here, Frank.”

  The ice ball went several feet wide of Roy.

  “I’ve been out of the country,” Roy said to them. “I lived in Italy and Greece. I can’t get used to being back here. Greece was funny, though. You know where Greece is?” he said to the girl.