She picks up the shell. It has an almost industrial smoothness. She holds it to her nose, hoping for a whiff of the ocean, a barnacle-and-oyster saltiness, but the shell’s odor has been boiled or soaped off somewhere on its long way from the ocean to Ohio. She bends down into the bin of freckled brown scallop shells, and then into the bin of wentletraps. Where’s the damn ocean? she mutters to herself. Still holding Noah’s alphabet cone, she steps to the bin of limpets, umbrella-shaped shells heaped together like toy plastic cars in a dime store, and she tries again to smell something oceanic, fathoms deep, itchy and primal. She moves down to the moon shells, the venus clams, the brown pygmy whelks. Then she finds the rocks. She passes her hand tenderly over the malachite, the rose quartz, the bloodstones and jasper and onyx, the banded agates from Mexico and the eye agates from Brazil. She touches the polished hematite, the arrowheads and pieces of chert. She puts her hand deep into a pile of smoothed mica and lifts the stones to her nose. She smells nothing—the stones and shells have no scent at all.
At the front counter she pays the furious-looking owner seventy-five cents for the alphabet cone. As he is putting the money into the cash register till, she says, “Your shells don’t have any odor.”
The man shakes his head, not looking at her. “They’ve been cleaned,” he says. “We buy them after the supplier’s cleaned them all up.” He puts the shell into a small brown paper bag, staples it shut, then hands it to her.
“You should leave some of them dirty,” Dorsey says, trying to be heard over the blare of the radio. “Your customers would like it better.”
He looks at her, the thick bulk of his neck reddening. His dark eyes check her out, top to bottom, and, just as quickly, dismiss her. “It’s unsanitary,” he says, putting the cigar back into his mouth and lighting up.
He is arrogant—she can see this—with all the undirected aggression of a physically powerful man who is running a failing business. She decides to speak up. “Tell me,” she asks, “what in the hell is a seashell without the fucking ocean?”
“Dorsey. Mind your language.” It is Simon, standing behind her. He is holding a souvenir coffee cup with a picture of the Ohio state bird, the cardinal, printed on its side.
“We don’t take to that kind of talk here,” the owner says, standing up, aiming the protuberant bulk of his stomach in her direction. “You can all just be on your way now.” His right hand, a reflex, makes a fist. He glares at them. Blue cigar smoke issues from his mouth, uncoiling.
“Let’s go,” Simon says. He bangs the souvenir cup down on the counter and leads Dorsey, followed by Noah, into the eye-burning light of Seashell City’s parking lot. Before Dorsey can say a word, Simon puts his arms around her and says, “And that’s why they call it a tourist trap, sweetie pie. It’s supposed to break your heart.”
“Simon,” she says, “all those stones and shells, they’re relics, they look like relics, they don’t have any business being here, they don’t want to be here, they should go right back to the earth, into the sea. No price tags, no polishing, no cleaning. Selling shells in Ohio … it’s so … Jesus, it’s so American.”
Simon scratches his neck. “And you say I struggle for bitchy adjectives.” He gives her a practiced gaze, sees that she is angry but not miserable, kisses her, and then lets her go. “I saw you sniffing those shells like a pig rooting for truffles, and I said to myself, ‘Simon, let’s get the little woman and Baby Leroy into the car and get this dumbshow on the road.’ ”
Once they’re in the car, Simon starts the engine and pulls out onto the highway. Dorsey removes the shell from the bag and places it up on the dashboard over the defroster vents, where it rolls pleasingly back and forth whenever they make a sudden turn in their wanderings across northern Ohio, gradually, through trial and error, nearing Hugh’s house in Five Oaks, Michigan, for the Fourth of July.
3
Hugh sits with his feet up on his desk in his glassy cubicle at Bruckner Buick on July first, very quietly testing out sentences he may use tomorrow or Thursday when Dorsey and her husband arrive. He is measuring these sentences for the specific gravity of their stupidity. “Dorsey … great to see you … how was the trip … Simon … you’re looking well … you’re … you.” Every word he can think of, every sentence of good will and greeting, sounds dull and duncelike. Though Dorsey and Simon are scheduled to arrive soon, Hugh has no clear idea when they’ll appear, because those two refuse to take freeways, ask for directions, or use maps. “Simon … what a pleasant …” Mouthing sentences in this way makes Hugh think of his brother-in-law, the actor, the man of plastic, the connoisseur of witty, cutting remarks. With Simon, you don’t notice you’re bleeding until two or three minutes later. You’re on the stairs or in the bathroom and suddenly you realize how carefully you’ve been put down, and there you are, hemorrhaging pride and self-confidence, schooled one more time.
“Dorsey? How’ve you been? How was …”
“Dorsey. Welcome back.”
“Well, well.”
The sentences shrink word by word to nothing. Hugh dreads Dorsey and Simon’s arrival. It’s an irrational dread: he feels himself stronger and bigger and more of a man than his brother-in-law. If he could hit Simon, punch him out in a straightforward way, he’d be all right. But here he is, practicing his lines, an actor himself. “Dorsey.” He looks out the front window at the highway. “Dorsey,” he says again, watching the waves of heat rising from the asphalt. “Let’s go buy some fireworks.”
Outside the seven front plate-glass windows of Bruckner Buick the summer lunchtime sun is sending everybody, distracted and sweaty, into the shade. It’s not a day to buy a car, or to sell one, either. For one thing, the demos have heated up in the sun, and their steering wheels are irritatingly sticky, and the cars can’t be cooled just by idling them with the AC on for a few moments before the customer gets inside. In this kind of heat the engines may perform erratically, and the AC blowers have to be set so high the customer can’t hear the salesman. Though the showroom is cool, and the sales manager’s beautiful-music tape is coating the air with string-orchestra syrup, Hugh and his fellow salesman, Larry Hammerman, have no customers. There’s nothing to look at or to listen to except the saltless music, or Larry’s methodically calm voice as he makes a follow-up call to a prospect, a high school biology teacher, a Mr. Peterfreund, who has set his sights on an Electra he probably can’t afford.
Thinking about Dorsey and her actor husband, Hugh looks around his semi-office—his imitation brass nameplate on the desk, his sales awards framed and hung with glued hooks on the wall behind him, his Rolodex and his inventory book set to the right of the decorative Bruckner Buick blotter, the pictures of Laurie, Tina, and Amy at the side of the desk, where both he and his distrustful customers can see them—and he stares at the highway shimmering in the windless heat, not even the used-car lot’s colored banners flapping. He tries out a sentence: “Dorsey, it’s been so long since I’ve seen you.” He waits. “What are you working on? Are you happy? Is it all right?”
The questions come dropping out of his mind like stones. These stones fall into a pond where they make no waves. Simon has all the good lines. He memorizes them. That’s his job. The person in the family Hugh has felt closest to lately has been his nephew, Noah, who never says anything, except with his hands. Sitting in his cubicle, sipping his cold coffee, Hugh has a sudden impulse to learn American Sign Language, or signed English, some way or other. I would be more articulate with my hands, he thinks, than I ever have been with my voice. He opens his desk drawer and pulls out a letter, with paper gone soft from much handling. The letter is addressed to Hugh and is written in a child’s hand. Noah sent it, by himself: Hugh knows this because the envelope’s stamp is upside down, a mistake Dorsey has never been capable of making. Although he has memorized the letter, Hugh reads it anyway.
Dear Uncle Hugh,
We will be seeing you soon. We are driving up and will stay with you. I am looking forwa
rd to seeing my cousins but I also can’t wait to see you. I miss you. I am going to bring you a present.
Love,
Noah
Hugh puts the letter into his pocket and walks out to the showroom. As usual, the cars give him a huge sense of their own appropriateness. They are antidotes to life as it is. Hugh loves Buicks. He loves them almost as much as he loves his own family, almost as much as he loves women. A person can’t stay with women all day, however. Hugh thinks of his attraction to women, his love for them, as a character flaw. Resolute men do not obsess themselves about women. They get on with things. Absentmindedly, he pats the dark gray Skylark on the fender above the left front wheel. The steel and wax do not feel like skin but an approximation of it, a powerfully erotic metallic sheath.
Unlike some salesmen, Hugh does not think of the customer as his victim. Any man or woman who strolls into Bruckner Buick is, in Hugh’s eyes, looking for a partner; his role as a salesman is therefore that of a matchmaker. Specials and Skylarks for the young, Skyhawks for married couples, Electras and Somersets and Regals and LeSabres for the demonstrably successful. The customer is the bride; the car is the bridegroom. An unhappy customer has only the matchmaker to blame.
On the other side of Highway 63 Hugh can see the flapless banners and cars hot as frypans lined up in the Pentel Ford lot. The Ford dealership gives him a low-level physical discomfort. He has an anthropological interest in other cars; they are the pointless and absurd competition. With downcast fascination he watches the competition’s commercials and studies their fact sheets. He loathes Lee Iacocca and had his heart set on the bankruptcy of Chrysler. Other cars are error, the result of a society dedicated to free choice.
With his salesman’s radar Hugh knows that Larry Hammerman has finished his call to Mr. Peterfreund and that the biology teacher has chickened out. (The wrong car for him, Hugh knows; the Electra was too much car for the man, clearly a Skyhawk type.) Larry is cramped over his desk in his cubicle, ruffling through a list of names for follow-up calls. In a town like Five Oaks there are never that many new names to call, and now Larry sighs, curses under his breath, and pulls his right hand, missing half its index finger (summer, lawn mower) through his thick expressive hair. Larry’s skin is pink; his hair is rusty brown, and when he’s frustrated the fires in his chest rage upwards past his neck and become visible in his forehead. His face turns a bright, desolate rouge.
Larry is, just now, under financial duress. His wife, Stella Hammerman, is wildly beautiful but spends money passionately on home furnishings and clothes, and has recently purchased with Larry’s approval a twenty-foot fiberglass boat with a thirty-five-horsepower outboard motor. To hear Larry tell it, all weekend long Stella and Larry speed around Saginaw Bay, occasionally throwing overboard a fishing line, sometimes baited. Stella is a good-time woman—Larry has told Hugh, in private, what Stella also likes to do in the open air on this boat as it drifts through the choppy excited waters—and Hugh respects Larry’s efforts to keep the bills paid. A man will do many things for a long-legged woman with cravings like Stella’s. And they have a daughter, too, fifteen years old, who has lately been seen perched on the backs of motorcycles, hugging the black-leather-jacketed greaseball drivers as they roar down the main street of Five Oaks toward the bowling alley and the video arcade. Her mother’s daughter, eager to please and to be pleased. Larry’s demons are starting to chitter; lately they’ve been keeping him awake, so that he sometimes staggers into the dealership in the morning with a wooden zombie gait and full-moon eyes.
He straightens up, seems to recognize where he is, and comes over to where Hugh is standing, and together they stare out the window.
“Nothing?”
“Punked out,” Larry says, shaking his head.
“How come?”
“The little woman saw the literature.”
“And?”
“ ‘Too much car.’ ”
“That’s what she said?”
“Those were Mrs. Peterfreund’s exact words. ‘Too much car.’ I’d like to give her too much car.”
“I saw her husband,” Hugh says. “She’s right.”
“Even a high school biology teacher can escape his condition, is what I say.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Hugh says. “He needs more than that Electra.”
“Such as?”
“A whole new life, for starters.”
Larry laughs quietly, a close-mouthed rhythmic wheeze. “I had faith in the guy,” he says. “He was already talking about options. Power windows and the visibility group. It got that far.”
Hugh nods. He is still looking out the window. “Hot,” he says.
“I’ve never sold a car,” Larry says, “when the temperature was over eighty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. Can’t be done. Except to accident victims.”
“Accident victims?”
“Yeah.” Larry worries the change in his pocket. “You know what I mean. People who’ve just totaled the beloved family auto. They never shop. They just come roaring in here and they buy the first thing they see. Remember the Klingerman family?”
“The LeSabre Estate wagon.”
“That’s the one. You weren’t in the showroom when this happened. You came in the day they took possession. The elder Klingerman came in here, no, excuse me, he wobbled in here sporting a neck brace and clutching a hospital-issue aluminum cane, and he pointed at the wagon, which was out on the floor, with that cane of his, and he said, ‘I’ll take that.’ The car had a noisy speedometer cable but I wasn’t about to dampen his enthusiasm. It was ninety degrees out. I didn’t even have a chance to remark on the heat or to ask him for his blood type.” This is a reference to Hugh’s matchmaker theory of selling cars. “He sat down and pulled out his fountain pen and his checkbook. You’ve got to respect a man in a neck brace who can write a check for over ten thousand dollars, especially in this town. Well, maybe you don’t. Hot weather sales are unpredictable. I don’t know.” He smiles. “Pray for accidents. Don’t pray for fatalities. With fatalities you lose the customer.”
“How’s Stella?” Hugh asks. It strikes him immediately as the wrong question, in this context.
“Fine,” Larry says. “She just bought a VCR with capacity for stereo sound. She’s been renting films faster than we can see them. Romance, horror, adventure, musicals, porn—I can’t keep up. How’s Laurie?”
“Laurie’s fine.”
“The girls?”
“Same as always.”
“Your sister’s coming to town, right?”
“Right.”
“With that husband of hers, the faggot.”
“Simon. He’s not a fag, not exactly. It’s more complicated.”
“Sure it is. When’re they getting here?”
“In time for the Fourth. I don’t know exactly. They don’t believe in maps.”
Larry nods, as if this makes perfect sense. “Where are they headed?”
“Minneapolis,” Hugh says. “Simon’s got an acting job there.”
“What about your sister?”
“I don’t know. She has a job in Buffalo, and maybe she’ll go back there because they’ve got their boy in a private school for the deaf that doesn’t force oralism and lip-reading on them. They do American Sign Language and signed English, and Dorsey wants to keep him there. She says he’s thriving. I don’t know if it’s so good for her to stay there, but … it’s her life.”
“Buffalo,” Larry says, a judgment.
“Yeah.” Hugh feels a moment of faintness, a sensation of helium filling up his head, so that, if he had no anchors, he would float to the showroom ceiling. Too much coffee, he thinks, trying to shake himself back to ground level. Where he is standing, the air conditioning hums with white noise, and the music and the thought of his sister together are giving him the willies. The showroom at Bruckner Buick, as he looks at it, is advancing toward him, then receding, accordion-fashion.
“What’s the matter with you?” Larry asks. �
��You just turned white.”
“Don’t know,” Hugh says. “Suddenly I feel terrible.”
“Take a breather,” Larry says. “My advice to you is, take the afternoon off. I can handle all this heavy showroom traffic. If I can’t, Leachman is around here somewhere.” Leachman is the sales manager. “You look like dogshit.”
“I feel like it,” Hugh says. “I think maybe I’ll take your advice.” He looks over to his cubicle, gazes for a moment at the sales awards, then heads out to his car, thinking of Dorsey and his own flawed, inherited circulatory system.
Behind the wheel, the air conditioner blowing uncooled air toward him—something’s wrong with it—the radio tuned to WFOM’s community billboard program, he feels a little better, but still hot. Because he has nowhere special to go, he is heading in the general direction of home, on the north side of Five Oaks. This daily drive takes him past Mason Motors (Chrysler-Plymouth), the Red Owl supermarket, Lampert Lumber, across the two Grand Trunk Railway tracks (the main tracks and the siding for the lumber yard), Knapp radio and TV, and then into what is called downtown Five Oaks. The few people out on the sidewalk in the business district, most of whom he recognizes, are pathetically wrinkled and wilted. He sees Mrs. Castlehoff, the pharmacist’s wife, red hair like a peat fire above a potato-famine face, carrying a large lumpy brown paper bag. Her hair is matted flat, and her birdlike face wears an expression of suppressed alarm—that she has been seen in public carrying a large bag full of lumpy suspicious personal articles? Or alarm at the heat? Or just alarm? Hugh smiles, waves to her, and though she sees him and acknowledges the nod with an irritated flick of her sundrenched head, she doesn’t wave back. She clutches the bag to her chest and hurries on to her car, an Escort with two good years left on it.
He brakes hard at the intersection of Lake Street and Cross, the site of one of Five Oaks’ hanging stoplights. As he waits, he closes his eyes and imagines this whole scene, Bacon Drug to his right, the Quik-’n’-Ezy to his left, buried under the water left behind by the melting glaciers. He thinks of huge Pleistocene fish swimming down the main street, and of clam shells washed up onto the stoop of the shoe store.
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