First Light

by Charles Baxter

  “All right, all right,” Hugh says. “I’ll give him a call.”

  “Thank you.” She makes an odd noise; it sounds as though she’s chewing gum. “How are you, dear? When are you going to invite me down to your apartment?”

  Never. “Soon,” he says. “I just need a little more furniture. That’s all. A few more tables and chairs, to give it some respectability.”

  “Well, that would be very nice. I know you have certain gutter tendencies and I just thought it would be bracing to your moral character if your mother threatened to visit.”

  “Right, right.” A customer walks in through the side glass door. “Listen, Ma. I have to go to work. Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay as long as your father is okay. Remember to call him. You do the nagging. You know how.”

  “I will. Talk to you soon.”

  “Good-bye, Hugh. Take care of yourself.”

  He checks out the customer: four-door LeSabre material. Hugh gets up and goes out to make the match. In ten minutes he’s completely forgotten about his mother’s phone call, and he won’t remember it until six months after Dorsey’s graduation, when his mother calls him again, but from the emergency room of the county hospital this time, after his father’s first heart attack. There’s a tone in her voice he’s never heard before: it’s high and trumpetlike. “He’ll be all right,” she says, but the trumpet tone in her voice says he won’t be. The trumpet announces that the end is coming, for both his father and for her. The tone of her voice is full of conclusions, and when it comes, Hugh sits back in his cubicle, and he sees himself alone in the world with his sister, just the two of them.

  13

  For her senior science project, Dorsey makes a four-inch reflecting telescope by herself, having ordered the parts from an Edmund Scientific catalogue. When the telescope is finished, she takes photographs of the moon’s surface with her father’s Nikon. She develops the photographs in the high school darkroom and makes the enlargements herself. Her most striking photograph is of the Mare Imbrium, the Sea of Rains, a dark section of the upper left quadrant of the lunar surface. This photograph, along with six others, and her telescope win her first prize in the Bay County Science Fair.

  She thinks about her telescope during her boring classes, such as English. Her English instructor is Mrs. Iglehart. The class is supposed to be enriched—all the students in it are planning to go to either college or junior college—but in Dorsey’s opinion Mrs. Iglehart makes nothing out of the books she assigns. She has the soul of ignorance: she doesn’t seem to know why anyone should read, and her idea of a good class discussion is one in which the plot of the text in question is thoroughly and exhaustively summarized. Starting in February, and going on interminably through March, they are studying Hamlet. With false enthusiasm, Mrs. Iglehart has repeatedly called it Shakespeare’s greatest, most wonderful play, a true monument of Western literature.

  During most of the discussions, Dorsey has kept her mouth shut, but one day near the end of March Mrs. Iglehart comes into class looking strangely manic and, speaking very quickly, tries to start off a discussion on the reasons for what she calls the play’s “special greatness.”

  Dorsey looks at her and thinks of the little old lady from Pasadena. “Why,” Mrs. Iglehart asks, her voice dry and hollow, “do so many people, the world over, identify with Prince Hamlet?” She makes an up-and-down motion with her index finger: does the motion suggest the world, or the Prince? Dorsey isn’t sure.

  The students look down at their desks or the floor or their fingernails. It’s a Five Oaks spring, and the sun hasn’t been out for weeks, and there’s mud everywhere. On some days it snows, and on other days it rains. Outside, the grass is steel gray and the trees are still skeletal and barren. The air smells of aluminum and old mattresses. No one in the class is going steady with anyone else in the class, so that productive tension is absent, and it’s too much trouble to write notes or even to be interested in life on days like this. High schools in the Midwest, Dorsey thinks, are cocoons within cocoons within cocoons.

  John Raftery, an acned pole-vaulter, says, “Is it because he has so much trouble making up his mind?”

  If Five Oaks is a cocoon, Dorsey wonders, then where is the damn butterfly? “Perhaps,” Mrs. Iglehart responds, her head shaking with pseudo-Parkinson’s disease, “but why do so many people identify with indecisiveness?”

  Dorsey looks at John Raftery’s ankles. He’s not handsome, but she’s noticed his long hands, and she likes the easy width of his shoulders. “Because lots of people are indecisive, that’s why,” Dorsey says, not bothering to raise her hand or to look at Mrs. Iglehart.

  “What? Excuse me? Dorsey, what did you say?”

  She imagines herself on a cruise, on a huge ocean liner, to … Nassau. The sun burns off bright surfaces there, and the air smells of palm oil and sand. “I was saying,” Dorsey says, “that a lot of people identify with Hamlet’s indecisiveness because a lot of people are indecisive.”

  “That’s circular,” Mrs. Iglehart tells her. “Perhaps people see reasons why they are indecisive in Hamlet’s actions.”

  She is with someone out in the open air, and this person’s breath smells of mint. She tries to quell her daydreams, but they steam up angrily from her subconscious like vapor from a teakettle. She raises her hand. “Actually,” she says, “I don’t understand why all these people do identify with Hamlet. Indecisiveness is only one of his problems. I think Hamlet is repellent. He kills people like Polonius without ever feeling sorry, but he won’t do what he’s supposed to do, which is kill Claudius, until it’s too late, and then he’s basically killing Claudius because Claudius has already killed him. Hamlet’s a sort of egomaniac. I suppose people think he’s lovable, but I don’t think so.”

  The sea breeze blows over her. Someone is with her. She lowers a grape into her own mouth and squeezes it slowly between her front teeth. She looks over at John Raftery, now, and sees that his eyes are blue. It’s the only primary color in the entire classroom. She’s never noticed before. Mrs. Iglehart has a pencil in her hand, and when she raises her hand to her forehead, a gesture that means she is thinking, the pencil leaves a faint trace on her skin. Dorsey throws an idea projectile out of her head toward John Raftery. Look at me, she commands. “Why do you call him an egomaniac?” Mrs. Iglehart asks Dorsey.

  John looks at her. They are in London, in the Savoy, ordering from room service. “Because he’s always thinking of himself, of how everything he does will appear to others. Hamlet wants to be popular. He wants to be popular more than he wants to be right. He wants everything to look right. It’s a mystery to me why people like him. I don’t ever want to meet anybody like that. I mean, I have met people like that, lots of times. He’s the sort of guy who’s always combing his hair and asking you, ‘How did I look? Did I look okay?’ ”

  John laughs, but he seems uncomfortable. There are other boys in the class she likes better, more interesting and thoughtful. She actually sympathizes with Hamlet, a man paralytically bewildered by the wars of love. Love must be powerful if it brings such scarifying people as those who live in Five Oaks together. She looks over at Tricia Blakely, who’s in the next row, not paying attention, giving off her usual icy sexual heat. Mrs. Iglehart walks closer to Dorsey’s desk, and Dorsey sees fatigue lines on her face and liver spots on her hands. “Well,” Mrs. Iglehart asks, “if you find Hamlet such a repellent character, what do you think he should have been like?”

  “What?”

  “How should he have behaved?” Mrs. Iglehart tilts herself backwards, and she scratches one hand with the other. Whoever married Mrs. Iglehart, Dorsey thinks, was a hero of love, and deserves a chest of medals. I’m going to be a virgin all my life, she thinks furiously. People will point and laugh. The air smells of chalk dust, a mortuary smell, and Mrs. Iglehart’s eyes are squinting with a mild, itchy anger. “If Hamlet shouldn’t have acted like Hamlet, who should he have been like?”

  Who
m. Whom should he have been like. Dorsey thinks for a moment, then says, “Antigone.”

  There is another long, dead pause in the classroom. Somebody (but not John Raftery) with blue eyes and sensitive hands is pouring wine in Dorsey’s hair. Mrs. Iglehart’s eyes unsquint. She looks quickly out the window at the dull thick horribly impossible gray sickening blank of Five Oaks in March. Then she looks back at Dorsey. “Antigone? We haven’t read Antigone in class this year.”

  “That’s all right,” Dorsey says. “I’ve read it.” They are making love on the carpeted floor; they are going out for dinner in evening clothes; they are seeing the lights of the city. So-and-so, intelligent cosmopolitan, takes her to the theater and kisses her on the cheek when the lights dim.

  “Well, then,” Mrs. Iglehart says, “perhaps you’d like to tell us about it.”

  All right. Once again I have to make a spectacle of myself, she thinks, before speaking. She tells the class about Antigone and her brother Polynices, how Antigone knows what she must do and then does it, despite the authorities, personified by King Creon. Antigone, Dorsey says, doesn’t have to moralize in order to justify her actions, because she knows what kinds of obligations she owes to her brother, even in death. “Antigone doesn’t try to be nice or clever or charming,” Dorsey says, throwing the sentence at Tricia Blakely, John Raftery, Carol Sue Trenbeth, and Bill Fitzgerald, who are insanely popular. “She just tries to do what she thinks is right. There’s a difference.”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Iglehart says.

  They’re going to put me in the Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not Museum, Dorsey thinks. Nearly everyone in the class stares at the floor. A few people are listening to her, but most of them look bored or as blank as the faces in police sketches of criminal suspects. “Well,” Dorsey says, “you asked me who Hamlet should have been like. I thought he should have been more like her.”

  “Whose class did you read that play in?” Mrs. Iglehart asks.

  “I didn’t read it in anybody’s class,” Dorsey says, sorry and humiliated that she ever spoke up. Good-bye to Nassau, good-bye to grapes and hammocks. “I read it at home.”

  Muffled sinus laughter cuts through the room as the intensity of the whispering increases. If Dorsey were to look up, which she is careful not to do, she believes she might see faces opening with staring contempt and lightened with sneers.

  “You must have quite a library at home,” Mrs. Iglehart says in an odd tone. This tone seems to Dorsey to be close to the opposite of praise, whatever that is, without quite hitting it. More choked laughter is seeded, blooms, and wilts behind Dorsey’s desk. Mrs. Iglehart moves in her peculiar sideways walk toward the blackboard. “How nice that someone reads at home,” she says distantly.

  Dorsey wants to say that the point is not that she reads at home, the point has to do with Antigone’s honorable behavior in contrast to Hamlet’s self-centered brooding. But from now on, there really is no point to the rest of the day except to get safely out of the classroom and down the hallways without being singled out as an intellectual sideshow any more than she has been already. The world of human beings is insufferable, not to be tolerated. She has never been laughed at by the periodic table or a theorem or an equation. To hell with all these people, she thinks; damn them all.

  14

  Hugh’s apartment in Bay City is a one-bedroom unit in the Evergreen Court complex, four blocks down Bay Road from a K mart and a McDonald’s, and only five minutes’ drive from Bay City Buick. He has furnished the apartment with a dining room table and chairs, a black vinyl sofa, a rocker, a side table with a decorative lava lamp, shelves for the stereo and records, a bed, and a dresser. The television set is on a rolling stand in the living room corner, and for color and variety he has hung a spider plant from a hook on the living room ceiling. The plant takes frequent watering, and Hugh isn’t always sure that it’s worth the trouble.

  But the women who come into Hugh’s apartment notice the plant right away; it seems to signal to them that Hugh can take care of living things. They sit down on his vinyl sofa and he brings them a beer or rolls them a joint, and they talk about their own plants—philodendrons and wandering Jews and African violets—and their jobs, and their cats. There are always stories about cats, when you deal with single women. Hugh makes the acquaintance of these women in the dealership and in the Romper Room Bar on Bay Road, and he still has a small inventory of girlfriends left over from high school who continue to live, in one capacity or another, in Five Oaks, thirty minutes north. All day he thinks about selling cars and making money, and all evening he thinks about women, whether they are in his apartment, talking about their cats, or not.

  He has lost interest in hockey and politics. After he could no longer skate competitively, he didn’t care about the sport enough to read the scores of the local or national teams in the evening paper. And as for politics, once he had flunked his army physical at Ft. Wayne in Detroit (some hearing loss in his left ear—he’d never known he had it), and once he knew he wouldn’t be going overseas where some of his classmates and friends seemed to have disappeared, he became himself. The war is on television every night, less and less of the war as the years pass, and that’s where the war stays. Hugh figures that he himself is now living the life every young man wants to live: good job, a good variety of women, weeks and maybe years of fine times before settling down.

  In his free moments he thinks about the clothes women wear, the gut-clutching curves of their thighs and calves, their blue and brown and green eyes and gold earrings and the perfumes they put on themselves, all over, everywhere; he thinks about the way they laugh and whisper his name when they’re close to him. He thinks about the way they sing. Most of his records are of women singers and Motown girl groups, the Marvelettes, the Supremes, and Martha and the Vendellas. Sometimes it seems to him that nature is playing a joke on him at his expense: it has taken away his free will, taken away his conscious mind, and has put instead the image of a singing woman in front of him, endlessly receding as he races toward it, like a dog chasing a mechanical rabbit. This is great, he thinks. This is just great.

  He’s had one-night stands with four of his customers, two of them married. After seven months he knows a good percentage of the eligible women in Bay City. His favorite, his semi-regular, is Mikki Mead, who is nineteen years old to Hugh’s twenty-two, and who works in the baby clothes section of Montgomery Ward. To exactly the degree he likes it, Mikki lacks refinement. If anybody asked him to describe her, and no one has, he’d say: she’s cigarettes, beer, one joint before making love, tight blue jeans over a sweet little ass, blond hair out of a bottle, pointy apple-sized breasts, and Sunday afternoons at the bowling alley. What he likes best about her is that when she comes, she laughs out loud. She doesn’t seem to be interested in much except satisfying her various appetites. That suits Hugh.

  He can’t believe his good luck. With all this war going on on television, here at home there are still plenty of women like Mikki who will actually take off their clothes and get into bed with him. To think that all through childhood, sex was being kept a secret! This free-for-all, this opening of mouths and the sweat and cries and the spilling—it was all a locked book, sealed shut. Why not tell children? Because they would be more angry at adults than they already are. They’d be disgusted.

  The idea of children appeals to Hugh slightly. He wants to be the first parent in the history of the world who tells his children the whole truth about life. But he doesn’t plan to start this project until he has sampled and tasted more of Bay City’s women, an intention that may take years to satisfy. Sometimes, toward the end of the month, a time when his energy level tends to be low, he slows down, does some accounting, and balances the psychic books. When that happens, he calls up Laurie Boyd and takes her out to dinner.

  Laurie, unlike Mikki, reads menus. She looks off into the middle distance, having thoughts. The only occasions when she smiles are those rare moments when she has a reason to smile; she doesn�
��t have Mikki Mead’s for-no-reason Disneyland grin. She doesn’t ask Hugh questions, but when he talks she bends forward, listening intently. She works as a secretary part-time and goes to school at Saginaw Valley, majoring in library science. Except for her hair, which has a light brown sheen, he always has trouble remembering the specifics of her appearance. Her personal gravity prevents her from having all the available fun there is, and something about this deficiency interests Hugh. That, and her habit every time she sees Hugh of taking him seriously. When he gazes at her across the table as she nibbles at her salad, he thinks: I’ve taken her home and shown her to the folks and Dorsey, and here I am with her again, and we’re still talking. He has no idea at all why he likes her.

  She’s the sort of woman that other guys say is no prize. She has an alcoholic father. And Hugh’s interest in her has little to do with Laurie’s talents as a lover. Often she has back pains, the result of an automobile accident in high school. No matter how he turns up the romantic atmosphere with candles and music and wine, no matter what he says to her, her kisses have an absentminded unresponsiveness. To Hugh this is a challenge, as if she couldn’t be had. They’ve been to bed together several times, and it’s been all right, but she doesn’t groan or laugh or pant. With Laurie the air in the room turns serious, but it also turns calm, as if ordinary things, too, had a right to be there.

  He likes to shuffle the pack, mix Mikki and Sharon and Rita in there with Laurie, but he puzzles himself sometimes, coming back to this woman who seems to offer him nothing but a long haul over bad roads in high, unforgiving country.

  15