The Exit Coach

by Megan Staffel

  “But I am,” Gregory replied, his beautiful lips stretching wide and the honest slope of his chin melting her insides.

  After that, Meredith brought the gangster into their lives. “Sit on that seat!” he cried from the back of their car when they passed a woman in tight nylon shorts cycling down the road. They were used to it. And now, long married, the kids grown up, there was no need to hide. Meredith loved that guy. Who else paid any attention? Who else, in the later years, was still desperate with desire?

  When it was just them, in the car or in the house, she would feel a kind of wrinkling in the air and then she’d see his bright blue face, his warty nose and bloodshot eyes. She’d smell cigar smoke, and soon after, she’d hear a remark. “Take it off!” he shouted at a female newscaster who looked worn out and brittle, despite the dyed hair, the youthful clothes, the makeup. Zoot wants you, Meredith could say. But she didn’t talk to TVs like he did.

  The Dexlers lived on the ridge over the next valley with their two-year-old granddaughter, a Chinese orphan their daughter had adopted and then abandoned when her husband had a nervous breakdown. “It’s so sad. Isn’t it sad?”

  Gregory, from long habit, could guess the context. “I don’t know. What else would they be doing?”

  “At their age to have to be parents again. To go through it all again. It must be exhausting.”

  “It could happen to us too. You never know.”

  “I hope not.”

  “Well, don’t worry, at the rate our guys are going, we won’t have any grandchildren at all.”

  He pronounced it with a finality that surprised her.

  “Wouldn’t that disappoint you?”

  “I don’t know, haven’t really given it any thought.”

  “Oh gosh, it would me. I think it would be wonderful.” She gushed like any sixty year old considering progeny.

  “You can’t predict. Who knows? Nothing happens the way you imagine.”

  Gregory believed in the body. He felt that all things would work out, and though he didn’t condone Dr. Zoot’s gin and mafia values, he also didn’t share Meredith’s earth-mother worries. The planet would heal. The species would survive. He’d moved from the body of clay to the human body, and now he was a chiropractor with a small, rural practice.

  The car radio, tuned to the local NPR station, whispered the news, and then suddenly a dreadfully loud and cheerful voice sang out from the dashboard, announcing women’s career day at the local college. “All area high school girls are invited to visit the Alfred State campus and discover their many options. You can be an accountant, an architectural engineer, a business administrator, a computer programmer, a court reporter . . .”

  “A cock sucker!” Zoot shouted from the back seat.

  “Imagine a career in the culinary arts, digital animation, forensic science technology . . .”

  “Loaded with benefits!” he cackled.

  Meredith saw the runny, bloodshot eyes, the moldering, tattered suit. Carmen, wherever she was, would be appalled.

  The Dexler compound was a group of buildings situated at the end of a long, freshly graveled driveway. As their car crunched towards it, thick white dust swirled about their windows. Meredith didn’t bother to knock because she could hear voices in the back. During the summer, all activities happened outside, behind the house, where there was a generous flagstone patio with a grill, picnic table, and dramatic views plunging in all directions. A huge striped umbrella was opened over the table and, as Meredith helped Sharon carry out drinks and hors d’oeuvres, a catbird performed from the bushes, speaking in the voices of all of the other birds of the neighborhood, trilling and yanking and squeaking at a rapid, insistent volume. By the time dinner was served, the bird had flown and the trees were swathed in darkness. Invisible cicadas, looking for mates, roared into the night.

  “We are so lucky,” Sharon said. “This paradise. This August music. Honey, did you check her diaper?”

  Vern stood up. With his tongs, he set an ear of corn on everyone’s plate. “It’s fine. And if it’s not fine, it can wait. Let’s enjoy and not think about it. Besides, she’s happy. Look at her.”

  Everyone turned to the two-year-old sitting in a highchair at the end of the table. Her eyelids fluttered in her flat, peaceful face. There wasn’t any food on her plate, but her head was canted backwards, a sippy cup raised to her mouth.

  “Very good, Dexlers. Training her to be an alcoholic.”

  Sharon smiled at Gregory indulgently. “I know. But she refuses to eat anything solid and she loves her sippy cup. I make her drinks in the blender. That way I’m sure she’s getting some nourishment.”

  “So important,” Meredith agreed, seeing the land tumble down under the clouds, a sliver of moon rising. There were candles, platters of good things to eat, a bottle of chilled wine. Next to her, the child with the wide face gazed at the sky through secretive eyes. The liquid going into her mouth was purple.

  “So what is it?” Meredith asked.

  “Well, it’s a blend. Whatever I have. Right now, it’s tofu, peanut butter, blueberries, spinach, yeast, and soymilk. She likes it. Don’t you, Naomi? You like your drink, don’t you?”

  Hearing her name, the little girl put down her cup and looked at her grandmother.

  “Naomi, can you say drink?”

  “Dink.”

  “Listen. Drrrr . . . . . ink.”

  “Ddd . . . . . ink.”

  “Good girl! And what is this?” Phyllis picked up an ear of corn.

  Naomi put the sippy cup to her mouth and tilted her head back.

  “Naomi, what is this?”

  She stopped drinking and said, “coin.”

  “And what is this? Naomi over here, what is this?” Phyllis pointed to her elbow. “You learned this word today, remember?”

  Naomi’s eyes lowered to her grandmother. “Bow,” she said.

  “El . . . bow,” Phyllis corrected. “Ellllllbow.”

  Naomi returned to her cup.

  “You know why she drinks her meals instead of eating them? It gives her a break from the constant vocabulary test. It’s really intense. Did we do that with our kids?”

  They were driving home, their headlights pulling them through the dark, humming world. Just as they started the descent from the Dexlers’ hill, rain slanted across the road.

  Gregory turned on the wipers. “I don’t think we did. Plus, it wasn’t like that then. There wasn’t that constant pressure. Kids could just be kids. They could learn at their own rate. And, remember, our kids weren’t Chinese.”

  “They weren’t?”

  “They were aliens, but not from China.”

  In the valley, the rain was steady. “Shit,” Meredith said.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Frogs. See them?”

  Strings of fog hung in the twin cones of light and the shapes rising up off the country road might have been leaves blowing in the wind, but the two of them knew from experience that those were frogs. Gregory slowed down. Hundreds were taking advantage of the wet pavement to cross from the marsh on one side of the road to the marsh on the other, and a certain percentage were dying under their tires.

  “Can’t you steer around them?”

  “I’m trying.”

  There were little frogs and big frogs, low jumpers and high jumpers. They’d flash in the beams for just a second, some going straight across, some going zigzag, some reaching their destination, others not. “I can’t stand it.”

  “Really, Merry, I’m trying. I’m not hitting many at all.”

  “How do you know? You can’t tell. They’re disappearing all over the world and this isn’t helping. I think you should pull over. I really do.”

  “Right, and then another car will come along and squash them.”

  “There are no other cars. No one’s on this road at ten thirty at night. Please. Stop.”

  “It’s too late. We have to get home.”

  “Just pull over an
d park.”

  “By the way,” Dr. Zoot piped up from the back seat, “rain makes them horny.”

  “Maybe,” Meredith said, ignoring the comment, “she likes the cup because it lets her suck. It’s comforting. After all, she’s lost two mothers. Maybe Phyllis took her off the bottle too soon.” Finally, Gregory was slowing down, moving to the shoulder so the frogs could cross the road without peril. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Okay, but I just want you to know I have to be at the office at seven in the morning. And look at it. This rain could go on for hours.”

  “It’ll stop soon. I’m sure it will.” But really, she knew that they could sit there on the side of the road, eight miles from home, for half the night. The water hit the windshield with that sort of steadiness.

  “This kind of weather? They get moist between the legs.” The Doctor was standing on the back seat, his oversized face thrust forward towards Gregory’s ear.

  “I know, I know, but the fact of the matter is that I have to get up really early.”

  “It must be so confusing,” Meredith said. “To feel finished with all of that and then have this tremendous responsibility dumped in your lap. It’s huge. It’s really huge.”

  Gregory turned off the motor. “Love gets them through it. Or something. But I’m really tired. And I really need a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow I have a huge day.”

  “Right. And the frogs too. They need to survive. Just think of all the ones we’re saving.”

  Smoke wafted over their heads and a phlegmy voice said, “She wants it. Look, you did what she asked. Any idiotic thing like that, they’re grateful. So, make your move.” Zoot waved his cigar in Meredith’s direction. “Talk nice. Flatter her up.”

  “We’ll do it tomorrow,” Gregory said. “We have to get home. I have to be at the office at six thirty.”

  “You think she’s going to let you go? Trust me. Sit back! Relax! Forget tomorrow! She’s ready, I’m telling you. All you gotta do is kissy, kissy, a little tongue action.”

  The rain drummed the metal rooftop steadily. The smell of wet earth permeated. Dr. Zoot disappeared and it was just the two of them.

  Mocked and Invaded

  When asked, Meredith said she was an actress, and although her resume was a five-page, single-spaced listing of all the roles she’d played over the years in productions across the state, she knew actress didn’t describe it. Just as driving, which was what she was doing now, with her husband in the seat beside her, hardly fit the number of activities that made up that moment, only a fraction of which were related to the fact that her right foot pressed the gas pedal and her left foot hovered over the clutch in case she’d have to brake suddenly. Her hands were on the steering wheel and her eyes were sweeping the fields for signs of deer ready to bound out in front of her, but all of that was secondary. Primary was the thinking, remembering, talking, and regretting what she was talking about at the very same time she was uttering the words.

  “You were so dazzled by all that glitz and show and just because they have the same kind of approach to medicine that you do, you sort of, I don’t know what happens to you.” I-messages, she was remembering. Put it in an I-message. “I don’t know what happens to you,” she said again, hoping that would suffice, and then she went right back to the accusations. “You relax or something. You just lie down and roll over and say yes to everything and you drag me into it and expect me to love them at first sight too and you’re totally oblivious to the fact that they’re despicable. They had nothing to talk about all weekend except the things they’ve bought. They’re consumers. Yes, they do alternative medicine, but they’re consumers first and foremost. Who cares about which kind of fucking bread machine? I hope you were bored,” she added.

  “Watch it,” he said, because a tractor had just pulled onto the little two-lane road ahead of them.

  She braked and then downshifted. “I see it.” But truthfully, she saw much more than the tractor that was pulling a round bale behind it. She saw the purple hills on either side of the valley, the black road cutting through the impossible green of spring fields that were suddenly naked after a blanket of snow, and the ribbon of mist made by the soft expirations of the newly plowed earth.

  They could have taken the interstate, but Meredith liked Route 7, which passed through one small town after another, each with a tattered dignity that was different from the tattered dignity of the town just before it. She wanted to stop and get lunch or a cup of tea but each Main Street they came to was locked down, its store windows empty because customer was a word from the past.

  “Were you?” she asked.

  “Well, I will admit it wasn’t the most thrilling weekend I’ve ever had, but it was nice to get away and I liked seeing their place and I like them even though . . .”

  “They’re really superficial,” she finished for him.

  “We just hadn’t found the right things to talk about,” he explained in a voice that was patient from the many years of arguments like this one. “And with you slicing them up with your cold blue eyes, no wonder. Just relax. Give them a chance. Babs and Newlander . . . they do really great work, especially with diabetes, which is a huge problem around here.” He looked off to the horizon as though up in the low hanging clouds he could see it, diabetes, hanging like a blimp over the land.

  “That couldn’t be his real name. What mother would name her son Newlander Forbes?”

  Gregory didn’t hear the sarcasm. “An immigrant mother, one who had great hope for the new land she’d come to, that’s who. His mother was from Sicily.”

  “Even so.”

  “You’re impossible.”

  “Only because you’re so gullible.”

  She wished they could take Route 7 the whole way home, but the valley was now slowly and imperceptibly tilting them down into the flat plane where the city of Binghamton lay itself out like a drunken idiot and imposed bridges and highways and measureless amounts of concrete onto the riparian meadows of central New York. On the other side of Binghamton there was Elmira. Shopping centers, a tangle of signs. On the other side of Elmira the disastrous weekend at Babs and Newlander Forbes’s house came up again, but then they were traveling on the wider, straighter four-lane that so much more quickly brought them over to the western side of the state, and the old sympathies of their long married existence returned.

  “It was awful, wasn’t it,” Gregory said finally. “What a mistake.”

  And Meredith only kissed his cheek because he was driving and they were on another small road, this one taking them up through the hills to their own much higher valley and he had to be on the lookout for deer.

  No, she wasn’t really an actress because she didn’t live in New York City or Los Angeles and she didn’t aspire to anything beyond the regional theater where there had been enough fine moments for her to have a following. But also, there was something else. Some kind of a wall. She wasn’t able to pass beyond a certain point. Her times “getting there” came and went; they couldn’t be counted on. And in the end they were only the occasional bright spots in a career that included many professional but uninspired performances. She’d never spoken about this to anyone, not even Gregory, because it would sound too bitter, too much like self-pity.

  At thirty-one, she’d been an extraordinary Juliet to an adequate Romeo. Her secret was a technique she called mirroring, taking the passion she felt for her husband, back-dating it fifteen years, and directing it towards another man. At thirty-nine she’d been the nurse. Yet as the nurse there wasn’t anything to mirror.

  ‘Yea,’ quoth he, dost thou fall upon thy face?

  Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit;

  Wilt thou not Jule and by my holidam,

  The pretty wretch left crying and said ‘Ay.’

  The woman who’d cackled over those lines had subtleties Meredith couldn’t reach. So she’d turned her into a buffoon and played for laughs rather than feeling.

  At fifty-two s
he was the wife of Macbeth. That role too was close to her. She took the ordinary desire to tangle in a husband’s life and blew it up huge:

  Hie thee hither,

  That I may pour my spirits in thine ear.

  In The Vagina Monologues, which she did the same year, she was “The Flood”:

  Down there? I haven’t been down there since 1953.

  She was “on” for opening night, but after the reviews and congratulations, the sadness of the story trapped her and she could never again play the woman from the inside. Her empathy was too shallow; it was all used up the first night. And because she herself wasn’t a woman like that, and furthermore couldn’t imagine the private occasions that had created a woman like that, a certain squeamishness kept her outside the character. Still, she was a professional, so most people didn’t notice. But she knew, the director knew, and that’s what mattered.

  Apart from acting, she was a cook and a gardener. She was also a bird watcher and had, with some success, become a student of bird language. And why not? She knew French already, but was she surrounded by people who spoke it? No. In the small rural outpost where Gregory had his practice, she was surrounded by birds.

  Children might have helped. But they’d never gotten around to it. First, theater seasons had intervened and then there were Gregory’s loan payments from medical school. So it was the farmhouse that became the object of their mutual attentions. They fixed it up—remodel was a word Meredith would never use for fear of being lumped with people like the awful Forbeses—and now it was functional, though admittedly a bit odd. A large and luxurious bathroom replaced the cramped and ugly original that her character from the Monologues would have seen no reason to change.

  They put a window over the soaking tub so they could look out on the wetlands, and on spring evenings they bathed and listened to nature’s opera, the “come hither” songs of male amphibians.

  This evening, the wetlands would be sheeted with ice. The April weather had turned cold, so they carried armloads of firewood into the house along with their jackets and bags.