Swimming Between Worlds

by Elaine Neil Orr

THE NEXT MORNING, Tacker got up early. He had nowhere but his parents’ house to go, no car, no job, but he had a few hundred dollars saved. He walked to a diner at the corner, picked up the Winston-Salem Journal, went in and ordered breakfast and coffee, opened the paper, and scanned the classifieds for houses to rent. His finger stopped at a house on West End Boulevard. His parents had moved to the newer Buena Vista neighborhood while he was in college and his dad had opened a second grocery, sleeker and more hermetic than the old Hart’s. Tacker had eaten half of his breakfast and drunk three cups of coffee when he folded the paper and started walking to the old neighborhood, with the intention of reclaiming his territory. He passed Hanes Park, where he had joyfully suffered four hot summers practicing with the varsity football team, learning how to escape gravity. He had played wide receiver, but this morning he cocked his arm like a quarterback and sent the phantom ball soaring to his younger self on the field, airborne to haul the leather in and press it to his heart. If working at Hart’s as a teenager had instilled in Tacker a sense of democracy (“Meet every customer with respect,” his father had said, though now Tacker could see that not everyone was actually included), football had taught him fair play, a concept also apparently defunct.

  West End was notoriously hilly, and Tacker angled up a side street. The rental house occupied the corner of West End Boulevard and Jarvis Street, an old foursquare, a style popular at the turn of the century, two storied, perfectly square, a mere five blocks from the original Hart’s. This one was upright, stately, and composed, and the porch seemed to invite him in. He could see into the spacious sitting room and an adjoining dining room. Another room opened to the right, a music room or library with built-ins. In the backyard, he found a separate wired garage, a perfect place for the motorcycle he dreamed of buying. He’d lusted for one since the days of riding a Schwinn New World as a kid.

  Tacker headed to the nearest service station, dropped a dime in the phone, and called the number in the paper.

  “Hello. Calloway here.”

  “I’m calling about the foursquare,” Tacker said, giving his name.

  “You and your wife?”

  “Just me.”

  “I had in mind renting to a family. It’s big for one person.”

  Did his voice betray his bungled last year? No one knew but his parents, yet Tacker suspected everyone could see through him. But on the phone?

  “Might be better if we met,” Calloway said.

  The man’s office sat right where Summit Street wheeled down to converge with West End and Reynolda near the old Daniel Boone marker. Tacker took a seat across from Calloway, who had a washed-out look and round shoulders.

  “It’s actually my mother’s house,” he said. “Tied up in a trust. So you understand why I’m particular about it.”

  “Of course. It’s a great house.” Tacker felt more confident.

  “What did you say your name was?”

  “Tacker Hart.”

  “The football player?”

  “Once upon a time.”

  “So you can catch a ball. How about minor repairs? Can you keep up a yard?”

  “I’m pretty handy,” Tacker said.

  “Thirty-five a month?”

  Midmorning, Tacker was in the basement of his parents’ house, digging through boxes of college leftovers. He found towels and a few old dishes and kitchen essentials, all of which he stuffed into a laundry basket and hauled up to his room. His mind sped. The cloth he’d brought home from Nigeria—he could see the girl he’d bought it from, under an umbrella, her entire inventory consisting of two bars of soap, one pack of cigarettes, and four yards of indigo-dyed cloth. It could be a curtain.

  A week later, on a hot August morning when his mother was out shopping and his father was at work, Tacker wrote a thank-you note and scribbled his new address at the bottom, walked to the bus stop with his suitcase and duffel bag, and waited. It seemed riotously funny that at age twenty-five he was running away from home, but the back side of funny was a welcome feeling of honor. He figured himself a pilgrim out to slay the dragon of his failure.

  He spent his first night on the floor.

  The next morning he scouted out a secondhand store full up with dressers recently cycled out of Baptist Hospital. They were metal and light. Of the two mattresses he could choose from, he took the one that came from someone’s guest room, or so he was told. He picked up the metal dresser, carried it onto a bus, and put it in the house. The mattress was a bigger challenge, especially considering the hills he was going to encounter. For a fee of two dollars, a kid at the store offered to help him walk it to the foursquare twelve blocks away. Tacker didn’t relish another night on the floor. At noon and ninety degrees they started out, trying to hold the mattress under their arms. But they kept losing hold of it. Tacker thought of the men he’d seen in Nigeria, pedaling bicycles, balancing mattresses on their heads, uphill and down. How had they done that?

  “Let’s try it on our heads,” he said.

  They jousted to get the mattress up and the weight distributed, and off they went. When they met folks on the sidewalk, they were forced to stop or tuck into an alley. Halfway to the foursquare, the kid backed up, not looking where he was stepping, and fell into a ditch. The mattress toppled, landing in the grass with a muffled thud.

  “I think I twisted my ankle.” The kid stood and tried to put weight on it. “God Almighty,” he yelled, slackening back to the ground.

  “I’ll run back to the store and get someone to come pick you up,” Tacker said.

  The kid looked like he was going to cry.

  “I’ll pay you anyway.”

  The kid wiped at his eyes.

  * * *

  • • •

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER Tacker was alone with his mattress, feeling fortunate to be on a side street. But it was a pitiful fortune, almost sublimely tragic. He used to be good at everything—in that other life when he won high school football games and picked up scholastic and civic awards, then excelled in college, finding himself in his senior year recommended by the department head, Professor Cabera, a dapper Argentinian with a vision that transcended North Carolina, for a choice international assignment with the Clintok Corporation. It had come to him like a perfectly thrown pass, a brilliant opportunity to further his career, though once he got to Nigeria he had found himself much more interested in the place itself, its cacophonous yet serene atmosphere.

  He pulled a tall blade of grass from its green sheath and put it in his mouth. A rumble of thunder and a dark cloud encroached in the western sky. Tacker hauled the mattress up and stood it next to a tree. His arm span was just wide enough to match the width of the mattress and grab hold of the sides. He put his head in the middle of the bed and tried to hoist it, but he was too close to the tree. He tried again, and this time he managed to get it up, but the thing slipped from his grasp and slid down his back. Across the street, two women his mother’s age stopped to watch. He tried again. The thing wobbled and Tacker had to shift it a little and brace his legs to keep it on his head. When he thought he had it, he took a step. Another. Five steps. He was back on the sidewalk. But the mattress hung in the front and he couldn’t see very far ahead. Not only that, it kept snagging on nearby branches. He went slowly. A breeze came and it felt good, but then there was another rumble of thunder. He couldn’t turn his head. There was no way but forward.

  Turning onto First Street with a mattress on his head, Tacker’s vision of himself as heroic pilgrim was pretty well fried. First was precipitously steep and the sidewalk way too narrow. A car horn blared and a DeSoto Firedome glided past, its finlike fenders bright in the sun. Finally he got to West End; only one more block. He swung out right into the center of the street. At the foursquare, he stepped up onto the porch, slid the mattress off his shoulder, and stood it against the front windows, slipping down beside it.

 
A yellow leaf floated down, harbinger of fall. The rain that had threatened didn’t come. Tacker lugged the mattress in, through the front rooms and to the bedroom, where he fell onto it and slept.

  The next day he went to Southern Bell and picked up a telephone. In the afternoon when his mother was at her bridge game, he slipped back to his parents’ house and returned with his old record player, two dozen LPs, and a fistful of forty-fives. He meant to work up his nerve to call Jill, his college sweetheart, twenty slender miles away in Greensboro. Pat Boone crooned “Ain’t That a Shame” as Tacker drank a beer. Back when he was at State College, he’d borrow a friend’s car to call on Jill at Meredith College. As far as he knew, she had no idea that he had returned from Nigeria several months ago now. He hadn’t written to her all spring because doing so would make the point. Now he needed to explain why he hadn’t written, much less called, in all that time. When darkness fell, Tacker stomped out the front door and took a long walk up from First onto Fourth Street and on into downtown. Finally he turned around and came back. He’d call her tomorrow.

  * * *

  • • •

  A WEEK LATER he called his dad though he still hadn’t called Jill. “Come by and see my place.”

  His dad showed up with da Vinci, Tacker’s cat, rescued from a Raleigh alley when he was in college, living in a frat house. Tacker offered his dad the only chair.

  “Your mother says you can have the couch we’ve got in the basement. And the old dinette set. She told me to bring the cat.”

  “Thanks.” Tacker stroked da Vinci’s back.

  “What are you doing about a bed?”

  “Hauled a mattress from a secondhand store.”

  “I could have helped you with that.”

  “I managed.”

  His father was a large-framed, lanky man, his curly hair beginning to gray. If Tacker had to choose one word to describe him, it would be particular. “You know, Dad, I’d be happy to help at the grocery. It’s just around the corner.”

  His father straightened himself in the chair. “Well, son, I could give you some hours. I’m not sure it’d be enough to live on.”

  “I’d like to manage the store.”

  His father looked at him as if beholding a square object that needed fitting through a round hole. “I’m not so sure about that.”

  “You know I can do it. I know that store frontwards and backwards.”

  “You can do it if you set your mind to it. But your mind has been absent of late.”

  Tacker still didn’t know what his parents knew of his sacking; enough, he guessed, to be reasonably anxious. The dismissal papers included a recommendation for a mental assessment.

  “Let me think about it.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ve got to get back to work.”

  “Thanks for coming.” Tacker dug his hands into his pockets.

  * * *

  • • •

  IN THE KITCHEN, Tacker opened a can of tuna fish. Da Vinci purred over his bowl, tail curled on the linoleum. Tacker rinsed the tin, the rush of water catching the slant of light through the window. In a sliver of memory he was knee-deep in a Nigerian stream out in the bush, light glinting off the water as he filled a bucket for his evening bath.

  A few days later, his father showed up on Tacker’s doorstep.

  “Frank Tilman’s ready to give up managing the store. Told me back in May. He and his wife are retiring to Boone.”

  He handed Tacker two keys on a ring. “Mind you, I don’t want to get in the way of your doing what you really want to when you’re ready. Connie’s staying as assistant manager. You show her some respect.”

  Long ago, Tacker had worried that his dad was sweet on Connie, or maybe Tacker was sweet on her when she first started at Hart’s, twenty-five years old and not married and Tacker was fourteen. Now she had two kids and a disappeared husband, and chain-smoking had withered her face.

  “Don’t let me down.”

  Did he say “again”? Looking back, Tacker couldn’t remember. The keys were in his pocket as he conjured Jill a few days later. They seemed tangible evidence that he might belong somewhere. That evening, he checked his reflection in the mirror and dialed her home number. The hall phone was cold in his hand. “Jill?”

  “Tacker? You’re back,” she said. “I thought you were supposed to be here in August. But I haven’t heard a word from you.” She sounded relieved and at the same time contrite, as if there was something on her side she was holding back. “It’s good to hear your voice.”

  “Been readjusting, I guess”

  “I almost drove to Winston to check with your folks. But I thought . . .”

  “I should have been in touch. I want to see you.”

  “Me too. You’re staying in Winston?” Her voice took on the barest hint of judgment.

  Was he ready to open up to her? He’d suggest a movie. “For now. How about I come down next Saturday? We’ll go to a matinee and have dinner.” Jill had a funny upper lip, almost a little lopsided. He adored it.

  She paused. “What time?”

  Was she trying to figure out how to squeeze him in between other appointments? He recalled an evening in Raleigh, a football game. She’d asked why he didn’t play college ball. “More important things to do,” he’d said. She had gathered his lapels in her hands and raised her mouth to kiss him.

  “I’ll be there by noon. Think about what you’d like to see. I haven’t been paying any attention to the movies.”

  “Well, you just got back,” she said, letting out a breath.

  In the silence after the call, he struggled to reassure himself. Of course it would take time for her to warm up. It had been two years.

  * * *

  • • •

  MONDAY MORNING HE showed up at Hart’s an hour early and still his dad beat him there.

  “I need to remind you of a few things.”

  “I know everything, Dad.”

  “Humor me.”

  * * *

  • • •

  WEDNESDAY TACKER WOKE to the sound of a bee in the room. He pulled on his blue jeans and closed the window and the sound stopped. In the kitchen he poured cornflakes into a bowl and he thought he heard the bee again. The afternoon when he was packed out of Nigeria, all he could hear was the drumming of his ears. Right this minute, he wondered if he was trailing some tropical disease, though he’d always heard it was the eyes that went first. He walked onto the screened back porch, down the stairs, and into the yard. Individual pine needles twenty feet up were clear as day. He whistled and could hear himself fine. Back in the kitchen, staring at his cereal, Tacker recalled Jill’s jet-black hair with its perpetual bounce. She probably wore a girdle now like his mother. He wasn’t any longer the man she had loved.

  He managed to eat his breakfast and get to the store, set up the cash drawers, and put out fresh bread. His mother stopped in around eleven. She said she preferred the old store but Tacker knew why she was there.

  “I’m making butternut squash soup,” she said, as if that explained everything.

  “You look great, Mom,” he said.

  “So do you, son.”

  “Thanks.” What she probably wanted to say was, Are you feeling stable? Do you want me to do your laundry? Are you back to normal?

  That evening he rang Jill again.

  “Something’s come up,” he said. “I’ll call you again. Soon.”

  “Tacker?”

  “Yes?”

  “I missed you for a long time.”

  “I know.” He thought he heard her sigh before she hung up. Jill wasn’t prepared to hear about what had happened. Though as a rule he told the truth to a fault, he knew he would lie to her. The sadness he felt was almost a comfort, it was so familiar.

  * * *

  • • •

 
WEST END HAD been Winston’s first suburb, designed when streetcars were in use. At the turn of the century, the upper crust had built Victorians and then Craftsman homes with terraced lawns along the neighborhood’s hilly, curvilinear streets. It didn’t matter to Tacker that the neighborhood was now transitional, at least around the edges. Transitional fit his mood. He bought a porch swing.

  He started running the track at the north end of Hanes Park. The third day, he experienced that terrible déjà vu he had had back in the spring, his heart seizing with terror. He bent over from the waist and breathed. That wasn’t enough to dispel it. He had to sit down on the grass and hold his head.

  * * *

  • • •

  IT WAS MARCH in Nigeria, still the dry season. Dust lifted from the roadside and entered the windows, settling onto the men’s damp arms as the university van motored up the Ibadan–Osogbo road, delivering Tacker’s team to a small mud-and-plaster chalet uphill of the Osun River in the heart of Yoruba land. After a year and a half on the project, they were joining a local contractor and a group of the town’s men to lay concrete block for the first classroom building. Auspiciously, it seemed, they would be in town during a week of Osun festivities, Osun—Tacker had learned—being not merely a river, but also the goddess of the river, a divinity whose power lay in her capacity to enhance fertility. Every woman in town, Christian or not, had been to the river. Men too.

  That first night in the chalet, Tacker and Samuel and the rest of them stayed up late, talking and drinking palm wine—all but Joshua, who was a teetotaler and read his Bible in the corner by lamplight. The incense of mosquito coils slued the air blue. They used sleeping mats. Near the end of the week, he met Anna Becker, an Austrian woman who had become an African priestess, and he wondered if everything he had ever known was illusion.

  Their last morning in the chalet, he woke to someone calling his name. Tacker groped for his shirt, knocking Samuel’s shoulder. “Were you calling me?” Samuel turned onto his back just as the curtained door to the room whipped open. Tacker’s American supervisor, Mr. Fray, a man he had met only twice, barreled in. “Get up and get dressed,” he said.