by Richard Ford
“Robert Frost. I’m meant to teach him in a week’s time.”
“That sounds great. I like Frost.”
“Great? I don’t know about that.” Tinkle, tinkle.
“It sounds great to me. I’ll tell you that. You’re going to take all the I’s out of it, aren’t you?”
“Yes, of course.” A laugh. “What silliness that was. He’s a bore, though, really. Just a mean child who wrote. Occasionally he’s amusing, I suppose. He’s short, leastways. I’ve read Jane Austen now.”
“She’s great, too.”
Angry blue-white smoke spews suddenly from underneath the tires of the black car, though there’s no sound. The carhop turns and steps languidly up onto the curb, unimpressed. The car bolts back, halts, then squeals forward directly at her, but she doesn’t even bother to move as the bumper bulls her way, stopping short and diving. She raises her arm and gives the driver the finger, and the car spurts back again with more white smoke, all the way into the Acme lot, and makes a one-eighty right out of TV. Whoever’s driving knows his business. Adelphia may be where race drivers live, for all I know.
“So, well. Are you married now, Frank?”
“No. Are you? Have you found an industrialist yet?”
“No.” Silence, followed by a cruel laugh. “People ask me to marry them … quite a number, in fact. But. They’re all idiots and very poor.”
“What about me?” I take another mental glimpse out her window into the atmospheric Narragansett town and bay. Plenty of sails. It’s all wonderful.
“What about you?” She laughs again and sips her drink. “Are you rich?”
“I’m still interested.”
“Are you?”
“You’re damn right I am.”
“Well, that’s good.” She is amused—why shouldn’t she be? General amusement was always her position vis-à-vis the western world. There is no harm meant, really. Frost and I are just a couple of cutups. I don’t even mind admitting I feel a tiny bit better. And what has it cost anyone? Two minutes of palaver charged to my home phone.
For some reason the car in the Acme lot has stopped. It is a long Trans-Am, one of the sharky-looking GMs with a wind fin like a road racer. A small head rides low behind the wheel. Suddenly more white smoke blurts from underneath the raised tires, though the car doesn’t exactly move but seems to want to move—the driver is standing on the brake, is my guess. Then the car positively leaps forward ahead of all its tire-smoke and fishtails across the Acme lot (I’m sure the driver is having a devil of a time holding it straight), barely misses one of the light stanchions, achieves traction, flashes by a second stanchion, and whonks right into the empty grocery cart, sending it flying, end-over-end, casters rocketing, plastic handles splintered, red “Property of Acme” sign sailing up into the white sky, and the bulk of the basket atumble-and-whirligig right at the phone booth where I’m talking to Selma in Rhode Island, the Ocean State.
The shattered cart hits—BANG—into the phone booth, busts out a low pane of plexiglas and rocks the whole frame. “Christ,” I shout.
“What was that,” Selma says from Providence. “What’s happened, Frank? Has something gone wrong?”
“No it’s fine.”
“It sounded like an explosion in a war.”
Dust has been shaken all over me, and the Trans-Am has stopped just beyond where it hit the shopping cart, its motor throbbing, ga-lug, ga-lug.
“A kid hit a shopping cart in his car and it flew over here and crashed into this phone booth. A pane of glass came out and broke. It’s strange.” The glass pane is now leaned against my knee.
“Well. I suppose I don’t understand.”
“It’s hard to understand, really.”
The driver’s door on the Trans-Am opens and a Negro boy in sunglasses gets out and stares at me, his head barely clearing the top of the window. He seems to be considering the distance between us. I don’t know if he’s thinking of going ahead and ramming the phone booth or not.
“Wait a minute.” I step out to where he can see me. I wave and he waves back, and then he gets back in his car and slowly backs up twenty yards—for no reason at all, since he’s in the middle of an empty lot—and drives slowly around toward the exit by Ground Zero. As he turns out into the street, he honks at the carhop, and once again she gives him the finger. She, of course, is white.
“What’s actually happening,” Selma asks. “Is someone hurting you?”
“No. They missed me.” With my foot I shove the corner of the shopping cart back out the broken window. A breeze flows in at knee level. Across the lot the carhop is talking to someone about what’s just happened. This would make a good Candid Camera segment, though it isn’t clear who the joke would be on. “I’m sorry to call you up and then have all this go crash.” The cart falls free out the window.
“It doesn’t matter,” Selma says, and laughs.
“It must seem like I live a life of chaos and confusion,” I say, thinking about Walter’s face for the first time all afternoon. I see it alive, then stone dead, and I can’t help thinking he has made a terrible mistake, something I might’ve warned him about, except I didn’t think of it in time.
“Well, yes. I suppose it does seem that way.” Selma sounds amused again. “But it doesn’t matter, either. It doesn’t seem to bother you.”
“Listen. How about if I took the train up to see you tonight? Or I could drive. How about it?”
“No. That wouldn’t work out too well.”
“Okay.” I am feeling light-headed now. “How about later in the week? I’m not very busy these days.”
“Maybe so. Yes.” (Scant enthusiasm for this plan, though who would want me as an after-midnight guest?) “It might not be that good an idea to come, really.” Her voice implies several things, a plethora of better choices.
“Okay,” I say, and find it possible to cheer up a little. “I’m glad to get to talk to you.”
“Yes, it’s very very nice. It’s always very nice to hear from you.”
What I’d like to say is: Go to hell, there aren’t that many better choices in the world than me. Look around. Do yourself a favor. But what kind of man would say that? “I should probably go. I have to drive home.”
“Yes. All right,” Selma says. “You should be careful.”
“Go to hell,” I say.
“Yes, goodbye,” Selma says—Queen Anne house, bright prospects, tidy faculty life, sailboats, leafy streets all spinning around every which way, and all suddenly gone.
I step out of the shambles into the breezy parking lot, my heart thumping like an outboard. A few slow cars cruise Route 524, though the town, here on its outer edge, lies sunk in the secular aimlessness of Sunday that Easter only worsens for the lonely of the world. And for some reason I feel stupid. The colored boy in the Trans-Am slides by, looks at me and registers no recognition, then heads on out to the nappy countryside, running the yellow light toward Point Pleasant and the beaches, more white girls on his mind. His dashboard, I can see, is covered with white fur.
How exactly did I get to here, is what I would like to know, since my usual need, when I find myself in unaccustomed environs, is to add things up, consider what forces have led me here, and to wonder if this course is typical of what I would call my life, or if it is only extraordinary and nothing to worry about.
Quo vadis, in other words. No easy question. And at the moment I have no answers.
“Ahnnn, you aren’t dead, are ya?” A voice speaks to me.
I turn and am facing a thin, sallow-faced girl with vaguely spavinous hips. Her sleeveless T-shirt has a rock group’s name, THE BLOODCOUNTS, stenciled on its flat front, her pink jeans pronounce all out of happy proportion the bone-spread of her hips. She is the carhop from Ground Zero Burg, the girl who gives men the finger. She has come to get a first-hand look at me.
“I don’t think so,” I say.
“You oughta call t
he cops on that little boogie,” she says in a nasty voice meant to portray hatred, but failing. “I seen what he didja. I use to live with his brother, Floyd Emerson. He isn’t that way.”
“Maybe he didn’t mean to do it.”
“Uh-huh,” she says, blinking over at the shattered telephone booth and the crumpled cart, then back at me. “You don’t already look too sharp. Your knee’s bleedin. I think you banged your mouth. I’d call the cops.”
“I hurt my mouth before,” I say, looking at my knee, where the seersucker has been razored and blood has soaked through the blue stripes. “I didn’t think I got hurt.”
“You better siddown before you fall down then,” she says. “You look like you’re gonna die.”
I squint at the orange awnings of the Ground Zero, fluttering like pennants in the breeze, and feel weak. The girl, the broken phone booth, the bent shopping cart suddenly seem a far distance from where I am. Inexplicably far. A gull shouts in the high white sky, and I have to stand against my car fender for balance. “I don’t see why that should be true,” I say with a smile, though I’m not quite sure I know what I mean. And for a little while then, I do not remember anything.
The girl has gone and come back. She stands by the door of my car, holding out a tall brown and white Humdinger cup. I am in the driver’s seat, but with my feet sticking out on the pavement like a dazed accident victim.
I try to smile. She’s smoking a cigarette, the hard pack stuck in her jeans pocket so the outline shows. A thick diesely smell is in the air. “What’s that,” I ask.
“A float. Wayne made it for you. Drink it.”
“Okay.” I take the foamy cup and drink. The root beer is sweet and creamy and hurts my teeth with goodness. “Wonderful,” I say, and reach in my pocket for money.
“Naa, ya can’t, it’s free,” she says, and looks away. “Where’re you going?”
I drink some more of my float. “Haddam.”
“Where’s that at?”
“West of here, over by the river.”
“Ahnnnn, the river,” she says and glances skeptically out at the wide street. She is maybe sixteen, but you can’t really tell. I would hate to have Clary looking like her, though now that is pretty much out of my hands. I wouldn’t mind, however, if Clary were as kind as she seems to be.
“What’s your name?”
“Debra. Spanelis. Your knee’s quit.” She looks at my torn knee with revulsion. “A good cleaner’d fix that.”
“Thanks. Spanelis is a Greek name, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. So how’d you know?” She looks away and draws on her cigarette.
“I met some Greek people the other night on a boat. They were named Spanelis. They were wonderful people.”
“It’s, like a common, a real common Greek name.” She depresses the door lock button then pulls it back up, taking a flickering look at me as if I were the rarest of exotic bird. “I tried to get you a band-aid, but Wayne doesn’t keep ’em anymore.” I say nothing as she stares at me. “So, like. Whaddaya do?” She has adopted a new sleepy way of talking, as if nothing could bore her more than I do. Again I hear a gull cry. My lip, where Vicki socked me, throbs like a goddamn boil.
“I’m a sportswriter.”
“Uh-huh.” She parks one hip against the door molding and leans into it. “Whaddaya write about?”
“Well. I write about football and baseball, and players.” I take a sip of my sweet, cold float. I actually feel better. Who would’ve thought a root-beer float could restore both faith and health, or that I would find it in as half-caste a town as this, a place wizened to a few car lots, an adult book store, a shut-down drive-in movie up the road—remnants of a boom that never boomed. From this emerges a Samaritan. A Debra.
“So,” she says, scanning the highway again, her little gray eyes squinting as if she expects to see someone she doesn’t know drive by. “Do you have a favorite team and all?” She smirks as if the whole idea embarrassed her.
“I like the Detroit Tigers for baseball. Some sports I don’t like at all.”
“Like what?”
“Hockey.”
“Right. Forget it. They had a fight and a game broke out.”
“That’s my feeling.”
“So, were you, like, a pretty great jock sometime when you were young?”
“I liked baseball then, too, except I couldn’t hit or run.”
“Uh-huh. Same here.” She takes a preposterous puff on her cigarette and exhales all the smoke out her mouth and into the shopping center air. “So. How’d you get interested in it? Did you read about it someplace?”
“I went to college. Then when I got older, I failed at everything else, and that’s all I could do.”
Debra looks down at me, worry hooding her eyes. Her idea of a big success has a different story line, one that doesn’t confess any start-up problems. I can teach her a damned useful lesson in life about that. “That doesn’t sound so great,” she says.
“It is pretty great, though. Successful life doesn’t always follow a straight course to the top. Sometimes things don’t work out and you have to change the way you look at things. But you don’t want to stop and get discouraged when the chips are all down. That’d be the worst time. If I’d stopped when things went the wrong way, I’d be a goner.”
Debra sighs. Her eyes fall from my face to my torn and bloody knee, to my scuffed wingtips and back up to the damp, soft Flum-dinger I’m holding in both hands. I’m not what she had in mind for a great success, but I hope she won’t ignore what I’ve said. A little of the real truth can make a big impression.
“Have you got any plans,” I ask.
Debra takes a cigarette drag that requires her to lift her chin in the air. “Whadda y a mean?”
“College. Not that that’s necessary. It’s just an idea of what to do next.”
“I’d like to go out and work in Yellowstone Park,” she says. “I heard about that.” She looks down at her BLOODCOUNTS T-shirt.
But I’m immediately enthusiastic. “That’s a great idea. I wanted to do that myself once.” In fact, I actually considered it while I was poring over life choices after my divorce. A blue plastic name tag that said: FRANK:NEWJERSEY seemed good at the time. I thought I could manage the gift shop in the Old Faithful Inn. “About how old are you, Debra?”
“Eighteen.” She stares studiously at the barrel of her cigarette as if she’d noticed some defect in it. “Like in July.”
“Well, that’s the perfect age for Yellowstone. You’re probably graduating this spring, right?”
“I quit.” She drops the cigarette on the blacktop and mashes out the hot end with her sneaker.
“Well, that probably doesn’t even matter to the people out there. They’re interested in everybody.”
“Yeah …”
“Listen, I think it’s a good idea. It’ll sure widen some horizons for you.” I’d be happy to write a recommendation for her on magazine letterhead: Debra Spanelis is not at all the kind of girl you meet every day. They would take her in a heartbeat.
“I’ve got a baby,” Debra says and sighs. “I doubt if the Yellowstone people would let him come.” She looks at me, flat-eyed, her mouth hard and womanish, then glances away at the Ground Zero, earless, awning flaps aflutter.
She has lost all interest in me, and I can’t blame her. I might as well have been speaking French from the planet Pluto. I am not an answer man of any kind.
“I guess not,” I say dimly.
Debra’s eyes come back round to me, and she is unexpectedly loose-limbed. My Humdinger is soft and waxy, and there’s no longer much for us to say. Some meetings don’t lead anyone anywhere better—an unassailable fact of life. Some small empty moments cannot be avoided, no matter how hard good will and expectations for the best try to make it so.
“So how do you feel now?” Like a lawyer, she touches her chin with her index finger.
“Better
. A lot better. This made a lot of difference.” I smile hopefully at my Humdinger.
“It used to be medicine, I guess.” She throws her hip to one side and holds onto the window glass with her fingertips. “Do you think it’s bad if I don’t have any of my plans set yet?” She squints at me, trying to guess my real answer in case I decide to lie.
“Not one bit,” I say. “You’ll have plans. And they won’t be long in coming, either. You’ll see.” I blink at her uncertainly. “Your life’ll change fifty ways before you’re twenty-five.”
“Cause I’m gettin older, okay? I don’t wanna piss away my whole life.” She drums her fingernails on the window glass, then leaves off. I can’t help thinking of Herb Wallagher’s dream of death and hatred. Everybody has the most perfect right to be happy, but sometimes there’s nothing you can do to help yourself.
“You won’t,” I say. “It’s all ahead of you.” I give her a big encouraging grin, though I don’t think it can do the trick for either of us.
“Yeah, okay.” She smiles for the first time, a shy-girl’s smile of politeness and misgiving. “I gotta go.” She glances over at the Ground Zero, where a yellow Corvette has slid in under the awning, its red blinker blinking.
“Can I give you a ride?”
“Naa, I can walk.”
“Thanks a million.” She looks at the phone booth where the shopping cart is resting against the frame, and the receiver has fallen off its hook. It’s a bleak-looking place. I would hate to make a phone call from it now.
“Did you ever like write about skiing?” she says, and shakes her head at me as if she knows my answer before I say it. The breeze blows up dust and sprinkles our faces with it.
“No. I don’t even know how to ski.”
“Me neither,” she says and smiles again, then sighs. “So. Okay. Have a nice day. What’s your name, what’d you say it was?” She is already leaving.
“Frank.” For some reason I do not say my last name.
“Frank,” she says.
As I watch her walk out into the lot toward the Ground Zero, her hands fishing in her pocket for a new cigarette, shoulders hunched against a cold breeze that isn’t blowing, her hopes for a nice day, I could guess, are as good as mine, both of us out in the wind, expectant, available for an improvement. And my hopes are that a little luck will come both our ways. Life is not always ascendant.