Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar

by Richard Ford

  More than once Henry saw Denise hand him a paper towel. “That happens to me,” Henry heard her say one day. “Whenever I eat a sandwich that isn’t just cold cuts, I end up a mess.” It couldn’t have been true. The girl was neat as a pin, if plain as a plate.

  “Good afternoon,” she’d say when the telephone rang. “This is the Village Pharmacy. How can I help you today?” Like a girl playing grown-up.

  And then: On a Monday morning when the air in the pharmacy held a sharp chill, he went about opening up the store, saying, “How was your weekend, Denise?” Olive had refused to go to church the day before, and Henry, uncharacteristically, had spoken to her sharply. “Is it too much to ask,” he had found himself saying, as he stood in the kitchen in his undershorts, ironing his trousers. “A man’s wife accompanying him to church?” Going without her seemed a public exposure of familial failure.

  “Yes, it most certainly is too goddamn much to ask!” Olive had almost spit, her fury’s door flung open. “You have no idea how tired I am, teaching all day, going to foolish meetings where the goddamn principal is a moron! Shopping. Cooking. Ironing. Laundry. Doing Christopher’s homework with him! And you—” She had grabbed on to the back of a dining room chair, and her dark hair, still uncombed from its night’s disarrangement, had fallen across her eyes. “You, Mr. Head Deacon Claptrap Nice Guy, expect me to give up my Sunday mornings and go sit among a bunch of snot-wots!” Very suddenly she had sat down in the chair. “Well, I’m sick and tired of it,” she’d said, calmly. “Sick to death.”

  A darkness had rumbled through him; his soul was suffocating in tar. The next morning, Olive spoke to him conversationally. “Jim’s car smelled like upchuck last week. Hope he’s cleaned it out.” Jim O’Casey taught with Olive, and for years took both Christopher and Olive to school.

  “Hope so,” said Henry, and in that way their fight was done.

  “Oh, I had a wonderful weekend,” said Denise, her small eyes behind her glasses looking at him with an eagerness that was so childlike it could have cracked his heart in two. “We went to Henry’s folks and dug potatoes at night. Henry put the headlights on from the car and we dug potatoes. Finding the potatoes in that cold soil—like an Easter egg hunt!”

  He stopped unpacking a shipment of penicillin, and stepped down to talk to her. There were no customers yet, and below the front window the radiator hissed. He said, “Isn’t that lovely, Denise.”

  She nodded, touching the top of the vitamin shelf beside her. A small motion of fear seemed to pass over her face. “I got cold and went and sat in the car and watched Henry digging potatoes, and I thought: It’s too good to be true.”

  He wondered what in her young life had made her not trust happiness, perhaps her mother’s illness. He said, “You enjoy it, Denise. You have many years of happiness ahead.” Or maybe, he thought, returning to the boxes, it was part of being Catholic—you were made to feel guilty about everything.

  The year that followed—was it the happiest year of his own life? He often thought so, even knowing that such a thing was foolish to claim about any year of one’s life, but in his memory, that particular year held the sweetness of a time that contained no thoughts of a beginning and no thoughts of an end, and when he drove to the pharmacy in the early morning darkness of winter, then later in the breaking light of spring, the full-throated summer opening before him, it was the small pleasures of his work that seemed in their simplicities to fill him to the brim. When Henry Thibodeau drove into the gravelly lot, Henry Kitteridge often went to hold the door open for Denise, calling out, “Hello there, Henry,” and Henry Thibodeau would stick his head through the open car window and call back, “Hello there, Henry,” with a big grin on a face lit with decency and humor. Sometimes there was just a salute. “Henry!” And the other Henry would return, “Henry!” They got a kick out of this, and Denise, like a football tossed gently between them, would duck into the store.

  When she took off her mittens, her hands were as thin as a child’s, yet when she touched the buttons on the cash register, or slid something into a white bag, they assumed the various shapes of a graceful grown woman’s hands, hands—thought Henry—that would touch her husband lovingly, that would, with the quiet authority of a woman, someday pin a baby’s diaper, smooth a fevered forehead, tuck a gift from the tooth fairy under a pillow.

  Watching her, as she poked her glasses back up onto her nose while reading over the list of inventory, Henry thought she was the stuff of America, for this was back when the hippie business was beginning, and reading in Newsweek about the marijuana and “free love” could cause an unease in Henry that one look at Denise dispelled. “We’re going to hell like the Romans,” Olive said triumphantly. “America’s a big cheese gone rotten.” But Henry would not stop believing that the temperate prevailed, and in his pharmacy, every day he worked beside a girl whose only dream was to someday make a family with her husband. “I don’t care about Women’s Lib,” she told Henry. “I want to have a house and make beds.” Still, if he’d had a daughter (he would have loved a daughter), he would have cautioned her against it. He would have said: Fine, make beds, but find a way to keep using your head. But Denise was not his daughter, and he told her it was noble to be a homemaker—vaguely aware of the freedom that accompanied caring for someone with whom you shared no blood.

  He loved her guilelessness, he loved the purity of her dreams, but this did not mean of course that he was in love with her. The natural reticence of her in fact caused him to desire Olive with a new wave of power. Olive’s sharp opinions, her full breasts, her stormy moods and sudden, deep laughter unfolded within him a new level of aching eroticism, and sometimes when he was heaving in the dark of night, it was not Denise who came to mind but, oddly, her strong, young husband—the fierceness of the young man as he gave way to the animalism of possession—and there would be for Henry Kitteridge a flash of incredible frenzy as though in the act of loving his wife he was joined with all men in loving the world of women, who contained the dark, mossy secret of the earth deep within them.

  “Goodness,” Olive said, when he moved off her.

  In college, Henry Thibodeau had played football, just as Henry Kitteridge had. “Wasn’t it great?” the young Henry asked him one day. He had arrived early to pick Denise up, and had come into the store. “Hearing the people yelling from the stands? Seeing that pass come right at you and knowing you’re going to catch it? Oh boy, I loved that.” He grinned, his clear face seeming to give off a refracted light. “Loved it.”

  “I suspect I wasn’t nearly as good as you,” said Henry Kitteridge. He had been good at the running, the ducking, but he had not been aggressive enough to be a really good player. It shamed him to remember that he had felt fear at every game. He’d been glad enough when his grades slipped and he had to give it up.

  “Ah, I wasn’t that good,” said Henry Thibodeau, rubbing a big hand over his head. “I just liked it.”

  “He was good,” said Denise, getting her coat on. “He was really good. The cheerleaders had a cheer just for him.” Shyly, with pride, she said. “Let’s go, Thibodeau, let’s go.”

  Heading for the door, Henry Thibodeau said, “Say, we’re going to have you and Olive for dinner soon.”

  “Oh, now—you’re not to worry.”

  Denise had written Olive a thank-you note in her neat, small handwriting. Olive had scanned it, flipped it across the table to Henry. “Handwriting’s just as cautious as she is,” Olive had said. “She is the plainest child I have ever seen. With her pale coloring, why does she wear gray and beige?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, agreeably, as though he had wondered himself. He had not wondered.

  “A simpleton,” Olive said.

  But Denise was not a simpleton. She was quick with numbers, and remembered everything she was told by Henry about the pharmaceuticals he sold. She had majored in animal sciences at the university, and was conversant with molecular structures. Sometimes on her break
she would sit on a crate in the back room with the Merck Manual on her lap. Her child-face, made serious by her glasses, would be intent on the page, her knees poked up, her shoulders slumped forward.

  Cute, would go through his mind as he glanced through the doorway on his way by. He might say, “Okay, then, Denise?”

  “Oh, yeah, I’m fine.”

  His smile would linger as he arranged his bottles, typed up labels. Denise’s nature attached itself to his as easily as aspirin attached itself to the enzyme COX-2; Henry moved through his day pain free. The sweet hissing of the radiators, the tinkle of the bell when someone came through the door, the creaking of the wooden floors, the ka-ching of the register: He sometimes thought in those days that the pharmacy was like a healthy autonomic nervous system in a workable, quiet state.

  Evenings, adrenaline poured through him. “All I do is cook and clean and pick up after people,” Olive might shout, slamming a bowl of beef stew before him. “People just waiting for me to serve them, with their faces hanging out.” Alarm made his arms tingle.

  “Perhaps you need to help out more around the house,” he told Christopher.

  “How dare you tell him what to do? You don’t even pay enough attention to know what he’s going through in social studies class!” Olive shouted this at him while Christopher remained silent, a smirk on his face. “Why, Jim O’Casey is more sympathetic to the kid than you are,” Olive said. She slapped a napkin down hard against the table.

  “Jim teaches at the school, for crying out loud, and sees you and Chris every day. What is the matter with social studies class?”

  “Only that the goddamn teacher is a moron, which Jim understands instinctively,” Olive said. “You see Christopher every day, too. But you don’t know anything because you’re safe in your little world with Plain Jane.”

  “She’s a good worker,” Henry answered. But in the morning the blackness of Olive’s mood was often gone, and Henry would be able to drive to work with a renewal of the hope that had seemed evanescent the night before. In the pharmacy there was goodwill toward men.

  Denise asked Jerry McCarthy if he planned on going to college. “I dunno. Don’t think so.” The boy’s face colored—perhaps he had a little crush on Denise, or perhaps he felt like a child in her presence, a boy still living at home, with his chubby wrists and belly.

  “Take a night course,” Denise said, brightly. “You can sign up right after Christmas. Just one course. You should do that.” Denise nodded, and looked at Henry, who nodded back.

  “It’s true, Jerry,” Henry said, who had never given a great deal of thought to the boy. “What is it that interests you?”

  The boy shrugged his big shoulders.

  “Something must interest you.”

  “This stuff.” The boy gestured toward the boxes of packed pills he had recently brought through the back door.

  And so, amazingly, he had signed up for a science course, and when he received an A that spring, Denise said, “Stay right there.” She returned from the grocery store with a little boxed cake, and said, “Henry, if the phone doesn’t ring, we’re going to celebrate.”

  Pushing cake into his mouth, Jerry told Denise he had gone to mass the Sunday before to pray he did well on the exam.

  This was the kind of thing that surprised Henry about Catholics. He almost said, God didn’t get an A for you, Jerry; you got it for yourself, but Denise was saying, “Do you go every Sunday?”

  The boy looked embarrassed, sucked frosting from his finger. “I will now,” he said, and Denise laughed, and Jerry did, too, his face pink and glowing.

  Autumn now, November, and so many years later that when Henry runs a comb through his hair on this Sunday morning, he has to pluck some strands of gray from the black plastic teeth before slipping the comb back into his pocket. He gets a fire going in the stove for Olive before he goes off to church. “Bring home the gossip,” Olive says to him, tugging at her sweater while she peers into a large pot where apples are burbling in a stew. She is making applesauce from the season’s last apples, and the smell reaches him briefly—sweet, familiar, it tugs at some ancient longing—before he goes out the door in his tweed jacket and tie.

  “Do my best,” he says. No one seems to wear a suit to church anymore.

  In fact, only a handful of the congregation goes to church regularly anymore. This saddens Henry, and worries him. They have been through two ministers in the last five years, neither one bringing much inspiration to the pulpit. The current fellow, a man with a beard, and who doesn’t wear a robe, Henry suspects won’t last long. He is young with a growing family, and will have to move on. What worries Henry about the paucity of the congregation is that perhaps others have felt what he increasingly tries to deny—that this weekly gathering provides no real sense of comfort. When they bow their heads or sing a hymn, there is no sense anymore—for Henry—that God’s presence is blessing them. Olive herself has become an unapologetic atheist. He does not know when this happened. It was not true when they were first married; they had talked of animal dissections in their college biology class, how the system of respiration alone was miraculous, a creation by a splendid power.

  He drives over the dirt road, turning onto the paved road that will take him into town. Only a few leaves of deep red remain on the otherwise bare limbs of the maples, the oak leaves are russet and wrinkled; briefly through the trees is the glimpse of the bay, flat and steel-gray today with the overcast November sky.

  He passes by where the pharmacy used to be. In its place now is a large chain drugstore with huge glass sliding doors, covering the ground where both the old pharmacy and grocery store stood, large enough so that the back parking lot where Henry would linger with Denise by the dumpster at day’s end before getting into their separate cars—all this is now taken over by a store that sells not only drugs, but huge rolls of paper towels and boxes of all sizes of garbage bags. Even plates and mugs can be bought there, spatulas, cat food. The trees off to the side have been cut down to make a parking lot. You get used to things, he thinks, without getting used to things.

  It seems a very long time ago that Denise stood shivering in the winter cold before finally getting into her car. How young she was! How painful to remember the bewilderment on her young face; and yet he can still remember how he could make her smile. Now, so far away in Texas—so far away it’s a different country—she is the age he was then. She had dropped a red mitten one night; he had bent to get it, held the cuff open and watched while she’d slipped her small hand in.

  The white church sits near the bare maple trees. He knows why he is thinking of Denise with this keenness. Her birthday card to him did not arrive last week, as it has, always on time, for the last twenty years. She writes him a note with the card. Sometimes a line or two stands out, as in the one last year when she mentioned that Paul, a freshman in high school, had become obese. Her word. “Paul has developed a full-blown problem now—at three hundred pounds, he is obese.” She does not mention what she or her husband will do about this, if in fact they can “do” anything. The twin girls, younger, are both athletic and starting to get phone calls from boys “which horrifies me,” Denise wrote. She never signs the card “love,” just her name in her small neat hand, “Denise.”

  In the gravel lot by the church, Daisy Foster has just stepped from her car, and her mouth opens in a mock look of surprise and pleasure, but the pleasure is real, he knows—Daisy is always glad to see him. Daisy’s husband died two years ago, a retired policeman who smoked himself to death, twenty-five years older than Daisy; she remains ever lovely, ever gracious with her kind blue eyes. What will become of her, Henry doesn’t know. It seems to Henry, as he takes his seat in his usual middle pew, that women are far braver than men. The possibility of Olive’s dying and leaving him alone gives him glimpses of horror he can’t abide.

  And then his mind moves back to the pharmacy that is no longer there.

  “Henry’s going hunting this weekend,”
Denise said one morning in November. “Do you hunt, Henry?” She was getting the cash drawer ready and didn’t look up at him.

  “Used to,” Henry answered. “Too old for it now.” The one time in his youth when he had shot a doe, he’d been sickened by the way the sweet, startled animal’s head had swayed back and forth before its thin legs had folded and it had fallen to the forest floor. “Oh, you’re a softie,” Olive had said.

  “Henry goes with Tony Kuzio.” Denise slipped the cash drawer into the register, and stepped around to arrange the breath mints and gum that were neatly laid out by the front counter. “His best friend since he was five.”

  “And what does Tony do now?”

  “Tony’s married with two little kids. He works for Midcoast Power, and fights with his wife.” Denise looked over at Henry. “Don’t say that I said so.”

  “No.”

  “She’s tense a lot, and yells. Boy, I wouldn’t want to live like that.”

  “No, it’d be no way to live.”

  The telephone rang and Denise, turning on her toe playfully, went to answer it. “The Village Pharmacy. Good morning. How may I help you?” A pause. “Oh, yes, we have multivitamins with no iron. . . . You’re very welcome.”

  On lunch break, Denise told the hefty, baby-faced Jerry, “My husband talked about Tony the whole time we were going out. The scrapes they’d get into when they were kids. Once, they went off and didn’t get back till way after dark, and Tony’s mother said to him, ‘I was so worried, Tony. I could kill you.’” Denise picked lint off the sleeve of her gray sweater. “I always thought that was funny. Worrying that your child might be dead and then saying you’ll kill him.”