by Larry Watson
Gene’s grip on my wrist tightened, and when he spoke, the urgency of what he said seemed as much an appeal for validation as an expression of menace. “I had her first, you know. I had her first and I can have her back anytime I want. Any fucking time.”
Fear might have motivated my reply. I was—I am—easily intimidated, and while I’m not eager to confess to cowardice, my commitment to honesty in this narrative won’t let me back away from it. Nevertheless, I believe that something else was working on me. I felt sorry for Gene. And I leave to others the question of whether I betrayed Marie with my reply. Since I never reported this conversation to her, I can’t report on her reaction.
To Gene I said simply, “I know.”
He released me, and then he and my cigarettes were gone.
Lying in bed that night I felt none of the fear of Gene Stoddard that I had been experiencing for months. Instead what kept me awake was fear that flowed the other way. Would the day come when I, perhaps like Gene’s father, could no longer live with the worry that someone was loose in the world who might at any time take my love from me? What was I willing to do to keep her close?
Those were my thoughts on a snowy night when almost nothing followed the path prepared for it.
As if to prove how fickle the climate of the northern plains could be, the next year’s November gave us a day so fair it seemed a gift from the gods. The temperature was mild, the sky was a pale and limitless blue, and Marie and I drove right through the day’s benevolent heart.
We had left Grand Forks, where by that time we were both students at the university, early on a Friday morning, and we were pointed toward Minneapolis. Marie’s sister had extra tickets for a Brothers Four concert, and we planned to stay with her for the weekend. We not only had the concert to look forward to, we would have two days to take in the city’s attractions, and if that weren’t enough, there was also the possibility that Marie and I would be allowed to share a bed. For an entire night. The prospect was tantalizing, for while we were having sex often, we never had the chance to sleep together. To literally sleep through the night in each other’s arms, head to dreaming head, took on an importance comparable to those earlier sexual milestones that marked the advance of our relationship. We both lived in dormitories at that time, but we were already making plans for the next school year. I was going to rent an apartment, and though I’d need a roommate or two to share rent, the apartment would provide a haven for Marie and me. Maybe she’d occasionally be able to check out of the dorm for a night or even a weekend, and we could truly live together.
As we drove through central Minnesota’s gentle undulations—turn your hand palm-up and raise it to eye level and its contours should provide an analogue for that landscape, a relief after the pancake flatness of eastern North Dakota—Marie and I felt as though we could pass for husband and wife. We had stopped at a diner and refilled our thermos, and we passed the single cup back and forth. Marie lit my cigarettes for me. Our conversation was as familiar, comforting, and unrestricted as the sky. No longer living under our parents’ roofs, our lives seemed completely and happily our own. Had we passed a highway sign announcing that the road we were traveling on would go on forever, it would have only deepened my contentment.
But what we passed, at intervals just regular enough to be puzzling, were cars pulled over to the side of the road. Eventually, I slowed for one, and the sight of the family inside, with identical expressions of confusion and grief on the faces of father, mother, and three children, alerted us to the possibility that something might be happening in the world that had nothing to do with conditions along Highway 10.
Marie snapped on the radio—and it was never off again when we were in the car—and we learned what in the instant of knowing it suddenly seemed strange not to have known: The president had been assassinated.
Did I steer the Studebaker onto the shoulder of the road? I must have. Yet the force of the radio news seemed sufficient to propel the vehicle’s tons without any help. That same force moved Marie and me into an embrace.
For a moment we debated whether we should go back to Grand Forks, or perhaps even drive to our hometown. Certainly Bismarck would find this news especially upsetting, considering its own history of assassination. But not every vehicle had pulled over. Cars and trucks continued to whiz past us, and Marie and I thought we had already learned the lesson. Deliveries had to be made. Appointments had to be kept. Rituals had to be observed. Leaves had to fall. Clocks had to tick.
In fact, America was still unsure, in the autumn of 1963, what it should do and what it should postpone. The Brothers Four concert was canceled, but the National Football League played its scheduled games. Of course, before the decade was over, the country would have its protocols for post-assassination behavior well established.
Marie and I were allowed to sleep together that weekend, at least after a fashion. Her sister kept her bedroom and her bed for herself and gave Marie the couch. I unrolled my sleeping bag on the floor next to her.
As we lay in our makeshift beds, Marie reached her hand down to me. I took it, though I didn’t pull myself up toward her or tug her down to me. Her sorrow, I assumed, canceled her desire to make love. I was well aware of the line that ran from sex to pleasure. I even knew of the connection between sex and pain. But of the power of sex to heal or affirm, I was ignorant and would remain so for years to come.
During the drive back to Grand Forks on Sunday, Marie was quiet. She was no doubt thinking about what had happened in the nation in the days just passed and how unsettled and unsettling the future now seemed. And perhaps that uncertainty caused her to question other matters—how many of us in those days of late November suddenly let go of assumptions and never picked them up again? So Marie may also have been given over to contemplation of what life would be like in the company of a boy—a man—who could not guess her need. And wouldn’t ask.
After the assassination, however, Marie and I were no different from most Americans: We resumed the lives we’d expected to lead and acted as though the future was once more in our control. We continued with our studies, Marie as an education major who hoped to teach elementary school, and I as an English major with the intent to teach as well. My ambition to write I kept to myself.
Just as I had planned, at the start of my junior year I moved off campus. I found a dark, damp, two-bedroom basement apartment close enough to the university that I could walk to class. For the necessary roommate I recruited Rob Varley, an acquaintance from Bismarck. Rob was quiet, solitary, and dedicated to his studies. A chemical engineering major, he spent almost all his spare time either at the university’s new computer center or in a laboratory. His focus on the future rendered the past of little interest, so we seldom reminisced about our hometown or our high school years. As I recall, Rob made only a single comment about Monty Burnham’s murder. The entire episode in the city’s history was, he said, “stupid,” an unsurprising assessment from someone who was interested only in problems that had solutions. When Rob was home, he was sleeping or studying, usually in his bedroom with the door closed.
In other words, Marie and I had plenty of opportunities for privacy, and though the university had a regulation prohibiting female students from visiting men in off-campus housing, the apartment’s entrance was on an alley and was blocked from general view by a garage and a shed, allowing Marie to come and go undetected. She probably spent as much time at the apartment as Rob, and she was responsible for whatever touches the place had that made it feel like something other than an underground cell. She hung curtains on the tiny windows that looked not so much out as up. She found a bookcase at a yard sale, painted it white, and arranged Rob’s and my books on the shelves. She threw a blue checked tablecloth over the lopsided, rusting table at which we ate our morning cereal. On the wall above the sagging couch she hung framed prints of Alpine scenes. As part of her dormitory contract she could eat in a campus dining hall, but she often prepared meals for us in the apar
tment, using the groceries we shopped for together at the local Piggly Wiggly. From those years two images dominate because of their frequency. The first—Marie, walking away from my bed after lovemaking, heading for the bathroom with a sheet awkwardly wrapped around her, her lovely back and backside exposed. And Marie and me on the couch, both of us reading; she’s lying down, her skirt is above her knees, her legs are across my lap, and I am absentmindedly rubbing her feet.
We were so comfortable and established as a couple that we could, like real husbands and wives, presume permanence in our relationship without discussing it. So it was only natural that Marie should walk into the apartment one October day and announce, as a wife would to a husband, “I think I’m pregnant.”
Here is what I should have done. I should have turned off the radio (the Yankees were playing the Cardinals in the World Series), walked over to her (she was standing at the entrance to the tiny kitchen, one hand on each side of the door frame, as if she were bracing herself for my reception of the news), taken her in my arms, and said, Wonderful. Terrific. Let’s go talk to Pastor Shoup over at Christus Rex right now and tell him we want to get married. You don’t need your parents’ permission, and I know I can get either my mother or my father to say yes without any trouble. And then we’ll go on with our lives and nothing will change except we’ll be married and that’s what we’re going to be anyway. No attempts to be clever or eloquent. Just simple, straightforward talk, without pose or artifice.
But though Marie’s announcement should have come as no surprise—we had always been inconsistently careful about birth control, and during the previous year we had become even more lax about the matter—I was shocked. In my contentment I had become complacent to the point of intransigence—I liked things just the way they were. Fittingly, I remained seated while Marie stood less than two yards away. In attempting not to demonstrate that I had been jolted, I tried for cool.
I asked the question that men have asked for millennia, and, next to “Is it mine?” it must be the one that women hate most to hear. “Are you sure?”
Her shrug said that she would try for a nonchalance to match mine.
There was still time for me to say or do something that would help close the distance between us. But there was another reason for my cool, and it came out in my next question. “Is this any different from before?”
Marie cocked her head quizzically. “Before?”
“You know. With Gene. What happened that time?”
Now it was Marie who stepped closer, but while she sat down across from me, she kept her arms and hands off the table, perhaps to prevent me from reaching over and touching her.
“That time?” she asked warily. “I’m not sure I know what we’re talking about.”
“Hey, it’s okay. I know all about it. He told me on his mom’s wedding day. Asked me if I’d be his best man. He wasn’t exactly overjoyed at the prospect of being a father, but he was ready to do the right thing.”
“Was he?”
“So when did you realize you . . . you know, that you weren’t pregnant. That time.”
Marie pointed to my cigarettes. Instead of just taking one from the pack, she said, “May I?”
“Help yourself.”
For the next few moments Marie did nothing but bring the cigarette to her lips and inhale and exhale, directing forceful plumes of smoke toward the low ceiling. I suppose I might have said something, but it seemed as though the right of next comment had been reserved in her name. Throughout this silent time she often stared right at me, and rather haughtily it seemed to me, something I was prepared to note if a quarrel broke out.
She eventually looked away—into the cracked and chipped soup bowl we used for an ashtray—and that was the moment when she began to speak.
“It took me a moment to remember when the wedding was . . . when you say Gene told you. But it’s coming back to me. Yes, I was once late with my period, and that could have been the time. That was unusual for me. And I’d been having pains and problems with my period. Something that still happens from time to time, not that you’ve noticed. I had an appointment to see a gynecologist. So Gene must have let his fear override his brain. After all, he was accustomed to things going badly in his life. But he knew where babies came from, so he had to have known I couldn’t have been pregnant. Could not have been.” She leaned over across the table, and the urgency of her words seemed to lift her from her chair. “Do you understand? Not possible. He should have known that . . . that we hadn’t done anything that could result in pregnancy. But maybe he had some confused notions about human anatomy or reproduction. Maybe he believed in virgin birth. Maybe he was simply making up a story just for you, something to impress you. Or depress you. But I do recall that for a few days he wore this look like his world was about to end. Not unlike the look you have right now.” She sat back down.
“The Yankees are losing. Maybe that’s what you see.”
“That’s very funny.”
I lit a cigarette of my own.
“But all jokes and sports talk aside, I have to make sure: You understand what I’m telling you, don’t you? I could not have been pregnant. I could not have been. Not then. Not anytime Gene and I were together. It was not possible. We did some things . . . and we would have done more if he had had his way. God knows he tried. But you were the first. Do you understand? The first. The only..”
“All right.”
“Maybe you need to know what Gene and I did? What happened that might have let him think—wrongly, stupidly—that I could have been pregnant?”
“That’s okay.”
“No, that you wouldn’t want to know, would you? Instead of the truth, you’d rather have your own version of things. Your own fantasies. After all, you could have asked me anytime. God knows you’ve asked me enough questions about the past. But you’ve always cared more about what was impossible to know than what you could know. You’re as haunted by the past—part of the past—as Gene was. But his ghosts were forced on him. He didn’t choose them.”
If it weren’t for that remark, I might have allowed myself to be chastened, and, repentant, I might have done exactly what the moment called for—apologized and asked for Marie’s forgiveness. After all, I believed her. There was never a moment when I didn’t believe her. Never. But when she compared me to Gene, I became angry.
“Okay. So now I have two versions of the past. Another chance to choose.”
She crushed her cigarette out so forcefully the bowl jumped and skidded across the table. Long after the cigarette was extinguished she kept jabbing the butt into the ashes. When she finally looked up, her eyes were flaring with fury, and even her tears had no power to put out the blaze. “You know what?” she said. “Fuck you. Just fuck you..”
Before I could make a move to stop her, she pushed violently back from the table, and stood, toppling her chair in the process.
Earlier I mentioned images that branded themselves on my memory because of their frequency. Here is one I carry because of its singularity: The apartment is tiny, but Marie manages to gain running speed as she heads toward the door. Although her progress is nothing but forward, away from me, her shoulder-length hair—brown in her first few strides but closer to red as she dashes through a shaft of sunlight that has found its angled way through a ground-level window—waves from side to side as she runs. Similarly, the motion of her plaid wool skirt is lateral as she runs.
Wounded pride and self-righteous anger kept me tethered to the apartment for an hour or two, and then I left in search of Marie.
Because of what happened at his tenth high school reunion, Raymond Stoddard did not want to attend his twentieth. But in the first week of January, the representatives of Wembley High School’s class of 1941 sent out invitations to their forty-six fellow graduates, and Raymond’s wife, Alma, immediately marked off on their calendar the days in August when the reunion would take place. Raymond knew he could do nothing to dissuade her from making plans for
them to attend, or to make her understand why he didn’t want to go.
Right from the start everything about the ten-year reunion had been wrong, wrong, wrong. First of all, the planners decided to hold the event in conjunction with the Catholic high school’s reunion, and in the process ignored the fact that the two schools had been rivals, not allies. Next, the band, such as it was—piano, bass, drums, and trumpet—played music popular during the war years, neglecting the obvious fact that in the spring of 1941 the United States’ entry into the war was seven months away. Over the course of the evening, Raymond noted renditions of, among others, “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” and “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old.” His fellow classmates, however, applauded those songs as if the songs had actually furnished the score to their high school years. Twice the band played “Skylark.” Raymond knew that song had come out in 1942, because he remembered exactly where he was when he first heard it. He had left Wembley on the train with a small group of friends and acquaintances, new recruits like himself, and all of them bound for Kansas and basic training. The train had a stopover in St. Paul, and Raymond got off to stretch his legs. He had never ridden a train for that distance before, and he had never been that far east. He walked up and down the platform, never straying more than three cars from his own, breathing in the odor of diesel fumes, and listening to a song that came from somewhere inside the station. Its melody was both melancholy and expectant, and in that regard served as the perfect signature for his state of being. He would hear the song often enough in the future that he would soon know its name and composer, and the versions he favored. While he stood on the platform listening, a thin, cold rain fell, and Raymond felt as if he were already in a foreign country.