Rock Island Line

by David Rhodes

  “Here I am back again. I had to turn off the water in the sink.”

  “Are you doing dishes?”

  “Well, I was just getting ready to. Carol always complains I don’t do my share, and she’s gone for the weekend, so I guess I don’t have anybody to blame.”

  “Do you want to do something tomorrow? Go somewhere or something?”

  “Well, my parents are coming to visit tomorrow and will probably stay till after dinner. But later that night or Sunday. Where do you want to go?”

  “I don’t care. We can go anywhere you like.”

  “Good, then let’s go to the shore Sunday morning. I’ve been wanting to go ever since it started getting warmer.”

  Pause.

  “Where?”

  “To Atlantic City.”

  “OK. Sure.” Pause. “How would we get there? Take a bus?”

  “We can take my car.”

  “You have a car? You mean you’ve got a car of your own?”

  “Yes. It’s a pretty old one, but it runs OK and I like it. It used to be my parents’ second car, but they never used it, so they gave it to me. Do you know how to drive?”

  “ Yes.”

  “Good, then you can drive. I’ll come over and pick you up. Where do you live?”

  “No, I’ll come over there.”

  “I can pick you up.”

  “Well, OK. I live at 921 Sampson Street. Do you know where that is?”

  “Pretty much. What time do you want to go?”

  “Any time’s all right. I suppose we better go early, or not?”

  Even though her car was really nothing to shout about, July once again felt trapped in a little drama that was somehow beyond him—participating in another tribe’s ritual. The two of them driving down for a day on the beach, in their own car (hers), a picnic basket behind them on the back seat, was almost surreal to him. He had never seen the ocean, but he didn’t let on so, and tried to pretend at each new stage of the day’s experience that he was completely relaxed and had done it a thousand times. He also began doing something only partially conscious. He began to invade her private world. Each time she would refer to some place she had been, or someone else, he would ask her, “Who? Where was that? When did you say that was, when you were in college at Penn? How long were you there?” And it pleased him that she so obviously enjoyed his attention. Just in the drive up she made several references to places and people he had learned about earlier, and her mystery seemed then to become partially revealed.

  Walking down the Boardwalk, they talked lightly back and forth. They cleared the buildings and stepped onto the beach. Mal was talking about an experience she had had and walked along for quite a way before she realized that she was alone. Turning around, she saw July still back at the Boardwalk, dumb-struck, staring at the horizon and the waves along the shore as though in a hypnotic trance.

  “July!” she called. “July!”

  He turned toward her, and smiled, and they walked out across the sand together. But from that moment on for the rest of the afternoon the attention she had received in the car disappeared, and for the most part July just sat and looked out over the water, eating sandwiches and drinking pop and beer in silence, freeing Mal to herself.

  The sensation of the clean, hot sun on Mal’s skin, and the relentless white sand, the marine horizon and the sea salvage washing in with the waves made her despair that she would ever be a great painter. She imagined she had only the emotional fury of the artist and none of the detachment or dedication. She stretched out on her blanket and put her hands down into the sand to the elbows, brought them up and let the tiny white particles fall through her fingers. She felt a kind of loneliness that was almost a pleasure, and small, insignificant memories of her past yawned open in front of her, inviting her back to when her mother covered her with warm sand, one foot after the other, and when Jimmy Morgan took his three trucks and sank them in the swimming pool behind their house and left them there until his father got mad, and the time she’d run away from home for an afternoon and sat in the tall weeds in back of Jacobsons’ garage and was covered with gnat bites. Then she remembered burying things.

  “Here’s another present to go bury,” said her father, handing Mal a quickly wrapped trinket he’d picked up at the university stationery store. She ripped it open, discovering eight cat’s-eye marbles and a clear blue bowler. “Thank you,” she said, and ran off into her room, where she could look at them in private with the door locked. They were lovely, except for squeaking together horribly when she squeezed them in her hand. Immediately after she examined each individually she felt the desire to bury begin to take hold of her; but she put it off. And waited. The magic could be bad if carelessly prepared. Marbles, for instance, should never be asked to do the job of long, thin things, or be put near them. Long thin things were the most powerful of all, and once when Leslie O. had made her cry, she’d taken a splinter of glass six inches long and buried it beneath the very spot where she’d been standing when Leslie’d said what she did, pointing right at where she’d been, and in two months Leslie had the chicken pox. Then after they’d become friends again, she’d dug it up.

  Mal waited for just the right day, and at the end of a slow, lonely evening she put the three yellow cat’s eyes in a little triangle pattern, each separated from its neighbors by the same tiny distance, in the very corner of the back yard next to the corner post, exactly four fingers deep. Those were for her grandmother. Three more went to a different place for her dolls; two for her future husband; and the last, the big blue one, right under where the eave pipe let the water onto the lawn, to keep her safe. If any of these was uncovered, no telling what evil might spread.

  Then she remembered the two linden trees that stood in front of their house when they lived on Prospect Street. The night wind rattling those giant trees’ leaves was like some great voice reading from the pages of her destiny; and though she couldn’t decipher the actual words, she could never listen without being sure that something prophetic was happening. The memory of the sound blended with the drone of the ocean and July’s talking brought her back into the present.

  “The ocean seems very nice today, don’t you agree?” he asked, still unable to take his eyes away.

  His pretending to have been to the ocean before made Mal want to laugh out loud in merriment. “Yes, it is,” she exclaimed. “Let’s go swimming,” and she jumped up from her towel and ran off toward the water, leaving July to follow at a slower pace, his eyes darting from her to the ocean, back to her, back to the ocean. She jumped right in, swam a couple of strokes, dove under, came up again, swam out farther and turned back to look for July. He stood in his brand-new swimming trunks at the edge of the water, viewing the waves suspiciously. She watched him gather his courage and walk forward to about knee level, then back cautiously out again. But at last he came in up to his shoulders, occasionally dunking his head under and moving several yards one way or another. He doesn’t know how to swim, she thought, and went over to him.

  Despite all his apprehensions, within a little while July found himself having a good time in the water and laughing freely and watching Mal, who seemed so like a beautiful fish with her long hair streaked flat across her face and the water beading on her skin. This too seemed a feeling that he only participated in—lent to him by her and her world, which except in these few moments of almost illegal pleasure were as different from his real self and his world as day and night.

  The water was too cold to stay in long and they returned to their towels, dried off and had something to drink. July was so exhilarated by his first successful contact with the ocean that he redoubled his attack on Mal and her private past with an almost obvious lust for detail, only occasionally being drawn back to the spectacle of the sea.

  “What kind of paintings do you paint?” “How are they different from one, say, by——?” “Are they all oils?” “How large, would you judge, an average picture of yours was?” “Do you work
standing up?” “Do you have a favorite color? Or flower?”

  After spending a day with her parents, who generally didn’t let her talk at all, this attention was welcome and it made her feel important; but better were the times when they laughed together, and best were the fleeting glimpses she had when he seemed a caricature of himself: because that was when she knew she had loved him from the first moment, as though his soul showed through him like a trapped, cloudy light wanting to come out, wishing for more air, always wanting only a couple of mouthfuls of clean air. It seemed he had somewhere inside him, bottled and smoldering though it might be, more life than in twenty of all the other people she had known. There was simply no telling what he might do next. He was unlike anyone else. His views and opinions when rarely they came out were always completely unexpected. He was always complimenting her.

  On the way back to Philadelphia Mal drove. The dashboard panel lights didn’t work and they rode along in darkness, only the passing cars’ lights illuminating their faces. The open air had made them both a little tired. Talked out, they sat quietly, experiencing the presence of each other unadulterated by expression or appearance. But the silence soon made July uncomfortable, or rather having someone else in it made him uncomfortable, and before long he was back to his questioning. Mal didn’t feel like talking about herself any more and her voice betrayed it. July retreated and remained locked in silence for the rest of the way.

  Outside his roominghouse in the car, Mal asked him what the other people that lived there were like. “They’re all right,” answered July.

  “Don’t you know any of them?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just don’t, I guess. They don’t have anything in common with me.”

  “How do you know if you don’t know them?”

  “I know them well enough to know that.” Pause. “Mal,” he began again, cautiously, “this day was—” Then he abruptly stopped, and it seemed to her that it was emotion that had choked him. She slipped over on the seat and touched his shoulder with her hand. With her other hand she gently turned his face toward her so that in the faint light from the street they could look into each other’s eyes, and in July’s there were tears. Violently he tore himself away from her, opened the door and slammed it shut and started for the house. In an instant she reached into the back seat, reopened the door and stood beside the car.

  “July,” she said. “You forgot your towel.”

  He turned back to her and they stood looking at each other from thirty feet away like two people from different planets. Then he came over, took the towel and kissed her quickly and clumsily.

  After he had gone in and Mal had turned around in the street and started back for her apartment, the door to the boardinghouse reopened and July came out, still holding his towel, and walked to the middle of the block, watching her drive away.

  TEN

  Mal Rourke’s parents disapproved of him from the start. Though they didn’t of course tell him their reasons, they made them plain enough to Mal, and she had occasion to tell him some of them. They drove July crazy. First, it seemed that the objections were well founded and in a way typified all his own fears. Then there was the fact that, no matter what he thought, they should be the ones who knew best and were solely concerned with Mal’s welfare.

  And, finally, it seemed a losing battle to keep getting to know a person who in the end is bound to turn out like her parents—whom he didn’t particularly like.

  Through their putting pressure on Mal to stay away from him, she was naturally driven closer . . . closer, he thought, than she would otherwise have been. She was being shoved. He feared there was nothing more solid behind her attraction to him than filial rebellion, which hadn’t anything to do with him at all.

  Finally, he told her, “You just like me because I flatter you.”

  “But you do,” she said, and laughed.

  “I know. I can’t help it.”

  Also, he didn’t like continually thinking about himself in relation to someone else. In the many years before, he’d gotten accustomed to thinking about himself alone. A part of him resented all the time she took up. If he wasn’t talking to her on the phone or going over to see her, he was thinking about doing one or the other. At work sorting mail he thought about her all the time.

  But these thoughts were in his weaker moments. Like most people, he had better times too, and then he was ecstatic. It was as though he’d been born into another person. Before, there’d seemed little to connect him with anything other than the daily pattern of his routine. Now he had the key, and everything was in some way concerned with him. Every novel was concerned with emotions identical to his own. Every painting attempted to portray his own feelings. Advertisements on billboards made sense. Where there had been no reasons, now there were. All the self-knowledge he’d believed he had before was comparable to a grammar lesson in understanding language—so intense and clear had his inner psychic forces become since he’d decided with the file cards in favor of not living alone. A purposeful direction seemed to have come into his life, where before there’d been only abandonment. Every week he spent all the money he made. He read as many books as he felt like, one a day even, why not? Sometimes he and Mal would spend the evening reading quietly two feet apart.

  With all these revolutionary things going on, it might be imagined that July found little time to think back on his previous life: that he would be completely occupied with the present. But such was not the case (nor was it likely ever to be). Each new emotion that he encountered seemed to be let loose from his past, and the more expansive he became on the one hand, the more groundless he felt on the other, as in flying a kite, the brisker the wind, the easier to get up, but the harder to get down and the more likely to break a stick. Or so it seemed to him. And when a problem would arise between him and Mal, he would think how his parents might have dealt with it in their own lives. He imagined he felt about Mal exactly the way his father had felt about his mother when they first met. His joy they’d had before. His despair they had suffered, as though drinking from the same glass.

  His new life was not altogether new. It reminded him of how he used to be in Sharon Center, before the accident, when he’d trusted to his destiny without question. He wasn’t so carefree now, not by any estimation, but for the first time since 1953 he had a taste of it—a confident belief in his own well-being: a promise from some silent place outside him said that each week would get better, each year be more than the year before. He felt himself fitting back into a natural current where all people were intended to be, except for those unfortunates who run into such catastrophes that they never recover and at sixty years old can think of nothing but of how they were on the first team in high-school basketball—before it all got bad.

  Simply stated, the more he got out of life, the more he demanded of it, and the more intolerable became any conflicts. And as time went on, all the rough spots related directly to one issue: sex. The desire he felt pounding through him and surging up into his throat, and the vibrant quality of Mal’s skin when they were alone in his room lying on his bed wrapped in each other’s arms, were for all their power, never enough to offset his sense of foreboding about the final naked act.

  “Because,” he told her, “I’ve reasoned it out. I asked myself—”

  “How can you reason about such a thing! Sometimes I think your heart is made of stone.” And with that she turned her face to the wall.

  “Be reasonable, Mal.”

  “I’m not reasonable. That’s the difference between you and me. You have reason, I have none. I have feelings, you don’t give a nickel for anything.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “I’m not talking any more. . . . What’s wrong with it anyway?”

  “Well, nothing really . . . but there sort of is. See, I was thinking, and I decided that everything would be better if the onl
y person I slept with was the person I was married to.”

  “Well, I like that! Have you got someone else in mind?”

  “No, but then the only way I could really be sure it was the right person was if I was already married. Don’t you see what I mean?”

  “No. And I don’t think I want to. You make everything too complicated. Don’t you ever just relax and be natural?”

  “Don’t you see that’s what I’m trying to be? But natural in the best way. If the only person I made love to was my wife—and after we were married—then she would become a symbol for my own sexuality. I’d never desire another woman because I couldn’t imagine it with anyone else. And it’d be the same way for her too.”

  “Phooey. One can always imagine.”

  “But fantasizing isn’t as bad as contemplating it.”

  “Oh, July, you make me so that I could just scream. You complicate everything so.”

  “It isn’t me,” he shouted suddenly. “It’s your parents.”

  A silence fell. It was a truth they didn’t enjoy talking about or even admitting. Mal didn’t want to get married. Losing her parents’ approval (and affection, it appeared) was not something she was willing to do; at least not right away. She’d never had to deny him point-blank, but that was because he’d had the good sense not to ask directly; if he had, she would have thought he was testing her—seeing what she would do for him.

  “Besides,” he said after a while, standing up from the bed and going over to the window, “my father never slept with anyone but my mother, and I think it’s right to be like that.”

  It was the second time he’d talked about his parents to her and his voice quaked with emotion, fearful that he was taking too great a liberty with his innermost secrets. Mal realized what tender ground he was on, and spoke very cautiously.

  “It might be that you had no way of knowing. It wouldn’t be likely you’d find out about anything like that.”