“You know the way to the landfill don’t you?”
He tapped the brakes and turned to her. “You’re taking all this stuff to the dump?”
“I don’t need it anymore. The dump is where you take stuff you don’t need, right?”
“If it’s something that no one else might need, sure. But there are other places to take perfectly good merchandise.”
“The same place you took our CD player, right? And my grandmother’s silver? But not my husband’s checks, I guess.”
“Your husband left you, didn’t he?”
“Just drive.”
“You’re dumping his stuff to get back at him.”
“Look,” she said, “I don’t need this from you. I hired you to haul this stuff away, not to counsel me.”
“You don’t really want to do this, you know.”
“You don’t really know what I want. What do you really want from me? You want my forgiveness? Is that all?”
“I don’t expect you to forgive me. It’s just a part of my recovery, making amends to the parties I’ve wronged. I don’t have a lot of say over a whole lot in this life, like whether you forgive me or not.”
“So all you have to do is apologize, and then it’s fresh start, clean slate, second chance?”
He pulled off the road then, into the parking lot of an antiques store. She tried to focus on the things the owner had put outside to entice customers, but the rickety office chairs and mediocre oil paintings depressed her, as they reminded her of the load in the back of the pickup, which would soon be dumped among the hills of ordinary daily waste. Christopher’s cross-country skis and the leaky pup tent where they’d survived a freak April snowstorm in Linville Gorge, left for scavengers to find.
“What is it you want me to help you do?” he asked softly. “Because I know it’s more than just clean your attic.”
She started to cry. She looked away from him, at an older man in a rocking chair on the porch of the store. He wore oversize black shades favored by people with cataracts, but she could tell by the way he cocked his head in their direction, his gaze frozen on the bed of the pickup, that he was interested in their load.
“Look, it’s okay,” he said when she did not answer him.
“No, it’s not okay,” she said. “I’m not ready to forgive anyone. I’m not capable of it, and I don’t see why I should have to go around forgiving everyone their sins. It’s not what I’d imagined for myself, this bitter old martyr I’ve become. I might as well open up a confession booth in the mall. Make some money out of it at least. I can quit my job and slurp Icee’s behind the curtain and dispense forgiveness to the wretched all day long.”
“Maybe you need to forgive yourself.”
She turned to face him, felt the heat in her cheeks, turned away again. The antiques dealer was still studying the merchandise. “For what?” she said to the dealer, although she was talking to her attic cleaner.
“I couldn’t really tell you what for. But it seems like to me you’re being awful hard on yourself. Blaming yourself for things that aren’t your fault.”
“That’s the problem with you people,” she said. “You refuse to take responsibility for your actions. Don’t blame yourself, blame someone else. Blame your genes, blame your parents, blame suburbia. If I blame myself it’s because I’m brave enough to accept the blame.”
“Okay,” he said. Simply, softly: okay. She waited for him to continue, but he left it at okay, as if they had come to some agreement. As if it was okay by him if she accepted the blame. They sat there. The engine ticked, and the cab of the truck began to heat up. She wanted to roll down the window, but she did not want to draw the attention of the antiques dealer.
“That guy over there’s already got his calculator out,” said B. R.
“Yeah, I noticed. I don’t have any antiques, though.”
“Just old stuff you want to get rid of? I bet he’d take it.”
She looked at him again, carefully this time. He was wearing a cap, and his hair was wild beneath it, and his eyes were kind even if she did not want to trust them.
“Where does he live?” he said. “I’ll drop you off at home and take it over there.”
Why not? she thought. She could squint and pretend he was Christopher, come back to retrieve his things, or she could look him dead in the eye and forgive him, this housebreaker who, no matter what he’d taken from them, had at least forced her to clean her attic.
“I guess we can call it even now,” she told him, even though she knew, and suspected he knew as well, that both of them were a long way from finding any kind of balance. She felt the load shift in the bed behind her as he whipped the truck around in the parking lot, and when a box toppled onto the gravel and he braked to retrieve it, Laura angled the rear-view so that she might watch it shrink and told him to keep going.
Muddy Water, Turn to Wine
JESUS HAD JUST LEFT Chicago, bound for New Orleans, when the girl beneath James stopped moving. Lit by dancing candlelight, she cocked her head as if she heard something over the second cut of side 1 of ZZ Top’s Tres Hombres, an album James would never have expected a girl to choose as sound track for a little late-night, bars-just-closed coupling. The walk from the bar to her garage apartment through the charged quiet of dark neighborhood streets, the way she laid him down on the tightly made bed while she went about lighting the half-dozen windowsill candles, the sound of the vinyl slipped from its sleeve and soon after of the arm falling, the needle scratching, the first bass-heavy notes of an album from James’s youth: James thought maybe he might be in love.
He did not hear the phone ringing. He kept up with Jesus, who was working from one end to another and all points in between. Aw, take me with you Jesus, sang ZZ Top. James was working his way down the Mississippi, muddy water turned to wine, when he finally noticed that Erin, beneath him, had stopped somewhere south of Chicago.
She had not gone rigid, as she might had there been someone in the room with them; she’d slackened a little, rocked gradually to a stop. Her eyes were wet. James heard the gurgling phone. It seemed to be buried under a towel. Boyfriend calling, he surmised. He knew squat-all about a boyfriend, but then he knew squat-all about Erin except that she’d just started waiting tables at the restaurant where he washed dishes and she was a music theory major and she was big-boned sexy, and over the fall and winter James had shed twenty-two pounds. At five ten, 137 pounds, he now favored flesh. He knew nothing about any boyfriend because he assumed it was her job to declare such a thing and it wasn’t something he’d ever think to ask of a girl who’d invited him back to her garage apartment after twenty minutes of making out on the muddy lawn of He’s Not Here, any more than he’d have thought to ask after any communicable diseases. Neither yesses were likely to make his night, which back then, late summer 1981, was about as far as his headlights shone in the dark.
“Do you need to get that?” He regretted these words as soon as they escaped, thought they sounded annoyed, clichéd, or both.
“I guess,” she said, but the phone rang three more times, muffled but persistent, before she made an effort to slide out from under him.
He watched her fish the phone from beneath the drift of clothes they’d peeled away and stretch the cord so that it reached into the bathroom. Of course she would do this — whoever called at 3 a.m. would likely require privacy. But it hurt a little. Or maybe he wanted it to hurt. He conjured a flash of jealousy or, rather, of bruised affection, which perhaps he could maneuver to sleep with her again.
She was gone for so long that James flipped the album. ZZ Top sang about a whorehouse in a Texas town called La Grange, where they had a lot of nice girls. Just let me know if you wanna go. James lit a cigarette from a candle, thumped ash into the bottom of his cowboy boot and, when Erin did not return after five minutes, figured he ought to just take off.
He was stretched across the sheets, reaching for his jeans, when the bathroom door opened, and then stopping to c
rank the music up so loud the window glass hummed, she had pinned him sideways across the bed. He pulled Erin down to him and while kissing her silently promised never to leave.
Afterward, the uneven candlelight made his temples hurt. He wanted another beer. He said, “There’s just something about a garage apartment.”
“What do you mean?”
“Yeah, I don’t know, I mean, they have this aura. Sort of romantic, sort of tree-housey?”
Erin got up and went to the bathroom, leaving James alone to consider his desperate appraisal of garage apartments. When she returned he lifted the covers up for her, but she stood above him, biting a fingernail on her left hand. Her right arm dangled. James could see that her mouth was twisted, as if she were sucking on her lip to keep from saying something.
“My dad died,” she said.
“Oh, wow. I’m sorry.”
“That was his wife on the phone.”
James sat up. “Wait, you mean now? He just died?”
“You think they’ll be okay at work with me taking a few days off?”
“Of course,” said James. He reached out for her hand, the useless one, but she stared at the wall above his head. He could not say why, but he felt like he’d remember that arm, the way it hung, forever.
“Man oh man. When’s the funeral?”
“Monday, I guess.”
James tried to remember what day it was. It was summer, he went out every night after work, everyone did, you closed the restaurant and then went to a bar or to someone’s house, no real reason to know the day of the week. He knew he had the weekend off. After a few minutes he figured out it was Thursday night, technically early Friday morning.
“How will you get there? I mean, will someone come and get you?”
Erin said she guessed so. She said it so morosely — as if having to be fetched for her father’s funeral were the saddest part of all this — that James, because he knew she did not have a car (she rode a pea green, wide-tired Schwinn with a milk crate wired to the handlebars; he’d used the bike as something trivial to talk about when he’d moved down the bar after work and took the stool next to her), said, “Well, I could take you.”
“That’s crazy,” she said. Because she had to, he knew. You have to say certain things, especially to people you just slept with. But she never once commented on the prominence of his rib cage, on the way his jeans drooped off his ass, his belt wrenched way past factory holes, buckled into ones he’d punched himself, crudely, with a screwdriver. She did not mention the sharpness of his hip bones, which could easily bruise anyone who came even wondrously into contact with them. She did not ask if he was sick. James was thankful enough not to want her to repeat the things that rote lovers awkwardly repeat.
“Why is it crazy?”
“You have to work?”
“Nah, I’m off this weekend.”
“I’m sure you had plans.”
She wasn’t crying. She seemed a little distracted but not terribly upset. Maybe she was in shock. He thought about the way she’d come bounding back to bed after getting off the phone with her dead dad’s wife (not, obviously, her mother; not even her stepmother), how she stopped to crank the music up, the things they’d done to each other before she said to him, My dad died.
“I can cancel them,” he said.
“They weren’t all that big?”
Now she was making fun of him. This was good — at least she’d veered from the script — but it was also, well, weird. Though he wanted to tell her that his ode to garage apartments was sincere, that he could love her just as much for where she lived and how she traveled to and from her cluttered, candlelit tree house — pea green, wide-tired Schwinn — than any of the more common and less interesting reasons people clung to. He wanted to say, Let’s just not go through all that this time. Let’s just up and skip it.
“They were medium.”
She laughed out loud at this, which did not make him uneasy as he attributed it to nerves.
“Just let me take you,” he said.
“You don’t even know where my dad lives.”
“I figure you’ll let me know once we get on the road.”
She mentioned a town on the coast.
“Just let me go home and get some stuff together.”
“In a minute,” she said, lifting the covers and sliding in close and warm next to him.
BACK AT THE HOUSE James shared with friends from his student days, evidence of a late night cluttered the porch, the living room, the kitchen. An unidentified boy lay cocooned in a sleeping bag on the couch, dirty blond bed head, cushion-roughened cheeks, his mouth opened as if his jaw, in sleep, had come unhinged. Noticing the sweat on the boy’s brow, James shook his head in halfhearted disgust, went into the kitchen to make a thermos of coffee for the road. Out the window, a water tower bearing the insignia of the university rose in silhouette against gray sky above the trees, reminding James of his own father, angry at James for not finishing his degree.
Listening to the coffee drip, James decided to call and cancel, then a second later wondered if, just in case she asked him to stay, he ought to pack his interview suit. He’d have to stuff it behind the truck’s seat so she would not see it. He whispered some things to himself in time to the dripping coffee: Just let me know if you want to go. Let’s up and skip all that.
As she climbed into the truck he studied her face for signs that she’d been crying. She appeared both exhausted and organized. She’d brought her bicycle, asked if he could tie it down in the bed so that it would not slide around.
“I don’t want to have to depend on people to take me everywhere while I’m down there.”
James nodded, though he wondered, Will she ride her bike to the funeral? He pictured black limousines, a line of old southern lady Buick 225s, her green Schwinn sandwiched between them. He added it to the list: garage apartments, Tres Hombres, rides her fat-tired beach bike in the funeral procession.
He wasn’t comfortable with the silence that overtook them out on the highway. He told her twice she could sleep if she wanted, but she just rooted through his tape box, ignoring the weepy acoustic side of James’s personality, the Joni Mitchell and the Dylan and the Leonard Cohen for louder, raunchier choices: Lou Reed’s Rock N Roll Animal, a Mott the Hoople album he only played once a year. Maybe she was trying to keep herself from sliding into despair. He kept quiet until they hit the flat, sandy tobacco fields southeast of Raleigh. The low roadside swamps made his ankles itch, made him anxious.
“Well, the seventies are over,” he said.
She had one foot on the seat, the arm holding her cigarette elbowed on a knee. He noticed it was the same arm that had appeared so forlorn hours earlier.
“Yeah, like a year ago,” she said.
“Taking a while to sink in, I guess.”
She rolled her eyes and appeared to wince.
“I mean, aren’t you glad?” James said.
“Why should I be glad?”
James shrugged. “It just seems like we got gypped. I mean, the sixties were crazy and all this important shit went down and on either side are these really gray decades where basically nothing happened.”
Her laughter was so sharp-edged that he decided to pretend to be joking. “You know?” he said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t think about time like that.”
“How do you think about time?”
“Certainly not in decades. It’s like you’re scared you’re going to be tested or something. You sound like a history major.”
“Sociology.”
“But you dropped out, right?”
“I’m going back next semester,” he lied.
“I might have to take some time off myself now,” she said. He assumed she meant because of her dad.
James said, “Listen, if you want to talk about it.”
“About what?”
“You know, your dad and all.”
“I imagine I�
�ve got plenty of talking about it ahead of me. Can we stop and get something to drink?”
“Of course,” said James. He took the next exit and pulled into the rutted lot of a low wooden store. Inside, the bowed floor creaked. The air smelled of something at once rank and sweet. Brutal late-morning sun poured through faint rectangles on the plate glass, the ghosts, James guessed, of posters announcing church bazaars and turkey shoots. In the back they hesitated by the drink cooler, which buzzed in a way that suggested its inefficiency. He started to make a joke about it, but her father had just died.
Erin slid open the door and grabbed a six of Tuborg Gold. She must have noticed the look on his face because she said, loudly, “You want anything?”
He shrugged and reached for his own six-pack. After all, he had no mourners to greet, no funeral to attend. He followed Erin to the front of the store, but halfway to the register she stopped at a bin and fished out a pair of thick-soled orange flip-flops.
“What size shoe do you wear?” she asked him.
He did not tell her that he could not wear flip-flops, that they hurt his feet.
“Eleven,” he said, and she grabbed a gray pair. At the register she told the clerk, “I’m paying for his beer, too.”
When he protested, neither Erin nor the clerk looked his way. He was aware of his skin-and-boneness, self-conscious about his cheekbones, the way the word emaciated seemed to pop into people’s vocabulary the minute he showed up.
“Y’all have a nice trip,” said the cashier as he handed Erin her change. Back in the truck, James realized that it was just like a trip to the beach. The music she chose, the way she kept her window open and surfed the breeze with her hand, the beer, the way she sat with a bottle between her legs, her flipflopped feet on the dash, her knees against her chest, eyes hidden behind her shades. Yet she’d suffered the kind of loss they say you never get over. James had never had anything happen to him, really. Well, he’d flunked out of school. He’d shed twenty-two pounds. What caused it was not a mysterious illness but this crazy love. He’d loved this girl so hugely that he’d lost all his friends over it. She’d been gone a year and his roommates had just recently started treating him the way they had before he’d met her. A week after she left, she wrote him a letter that said I would die for you, and two weeks after that she moved in with some guy she knew from her English class and would not answer his phone calls. When he called her up at her job, she treated him as if he was harassing her. “Whatever happened to I would die for you?” he said to the dial tone after she hung up on him. At the time, James thought it was the worst thing that would ever happen to him, but sometimes it seemed nothing more than someone saying what they felt at the time.
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