Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar

by Richard Ford

  The first thing that hit him, when he let himself in the apartment door, was the smell of Brussels sprouts. The children were still at their supper in the kitchen: he could hear their high mumbled voices over the clink of dishes, and then his wife’s voice, tired and coaxing. When the door slammed he heard her say, “There’s Daddy now,” and the children began to call, “Daddy! Daddy!”

  He put his hat carefully in the hall closet and turned around just as she appeared in the kitchen doorway, drying her hands on her apron and smiling through her tiredness. “Home on time for once,” she said. “How lovely. I was afraid you’d be working late again.”

  “No,” he said. “No, I didn’t have to work late.” His voice had an oddly foreign, amplified sound in his own ears, as if he were speaking in an echo chamber.

  “You do look tired, though, Walt. You look worn out.”

  “Walked home, that’s all. Guess I’m not used to it. How’s everything?”

  “Oh, fine.” But she looked worn out herself.

  When they went together into the kitchen he felt encircled and entrapped by its humid brightness. His eyes roamed dolefully over the milk cartons, the mayonnaise jars and soup cans and cereal boxes, the peaches lined up to ripen on the windowsill, the remarkable frailty and tenderness of his two children, whose chattering faces were lightly streaked with mashed potato.

  Things looked better in the bathroom, where he took longer than necessary over the job of washing up for dinner. At least he could be alone here, braced by splashings of cold water; the only intrusion was the sound of his wife’s voice rising in impatience with the older child. “All right, Andrew Henderson. No story for you tonight unless you finish up all that custard now.” A little later came the scraping of chairs and stacking of dishes that meant their supper was over, and the light scuffle of shoes and the slamming door that meant they had been turned loose in their room for an hour to play before bath time.

  Walter carefully dried his hands; then he went out to the living-room sofa and settled himself there with a magazine, taking very slow, deep breaths to show how self-controlled he was. In a minute she came in to join him, her apron removed and her lipstick replenished, bringing the cocktail pitcher full of ice. “Oh,” she said with a sigh. “Thank God that’s over. Now for a little peace and quiet.”

  “I’ll get the drinks, honey,” he said, bolting to his feet. He had hoped his voice might sound normal now, but it still came out with echo-chamber resonance.

  “You will not,” she commanded. “You sit down. You deserve to sit still and be waited on, when you come home looking so tired. How did the day go, Walt?”

  “Oh, all right,” he said, sitting down again. “Fine.” He watched her measuring out the gin and vermouth, stirring the pitcher in her neat, quick way, arranging the tray and bringing it across the room.

  “There,” she said, settling herself close beside him. “Will you do the honors, darling?” And when he had tilled the chilled glasses she raised hers and said, “Oh, lovely. Cheers.” This bright cocktail mood was a carefully studied effect, he knew. So was her motherly sternness over the children’s supper; so was the brisk, no-nonsense efficiency with which, earlier today, she had attacked the supermarket; and so, later tonight, would be the tenderness of her surrender in his arms. The orderly rotation of many careful moods was her life, or rather, was what her life had become. She managed it well, and it was only rarely, looking very closely at her face, that he could see how much the effort was costing her.

  But the drink was a great help. The first bitter, ice-cold sip of it seemed to restore his calm, and the glass in his hand looked reassuringly deep. He took another sip or two before daring to look at her again, and when he did it was a heartening sight. Her smile was almost completely free of tension, and soon they were chatting together as comfortably as happy lovers.

  “Oh, isn’t it nice just to sit down and unwind?” she said, allowing her head to sink back into the upholstery. “And isn’t it lovely to think it’s Friday night?”

  “Sure is,” he said, and instantly put his mouth in his drink to hide his shock. Friday night! That meant there would be two days before he could even begin to look for a job—two days of mild imprisonment in the house, or of dealing with tricycles and popsicles in the park, without a hope of escaping the burden of his secret. “Funny,” he said. “I’d almost forgotten it was Friday.”

  “Oh, how can you forget?” She squirmed luxuriously deeper into the sofa. “I look forward to it all week. Pour me just a tiny bit more, darling, and then I must get back to the chores.”

  He poured a tiny bit more for her and a full glass for himself. His hand was shaking and he spilled a little of it, but she didn’t seem to notice. Nor did she seem to notice that his replies grew more and more strained as she kept the conversation going. When she got back to the chores—basting the roast, drawing the children’s baths, tidying up their room for the night—Walter sat alone and allowed his mind to slide into a heavy, gin-fuddled confusion. Only one persistent thought came through, a piece of self-advice that was as clear and cold as the drink that rose again and again to his lips: Hold on. No matter what she says, no matter what happens tonight or tomorrow or the next day, just hold on. Hold on.

  But holding on grew less and less easy as the children’s splashing bath-noises floated into the room; it was more difficult still by the time they were brought in to say goodnight, carrying their teddy bears and dressed in clean pajamas, their faces shining and smelling of soap. After that, it became impossible to stay seated on the sofa. He sprang up and began stalking around the floor, lighting one cigarette after another, listening to his wife’s clear, modulated reading of the bedtime story in the next room (“You may go into the fields, or down the lane, but don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden . . .”).

  When she came out again, closing the children’s door behind her, she found him standing like a tragic statue at the window, looking down into the darkening courtyard. “What’s the matter, Walt?”

  He turned on her with a false grin. “Nothing’s the matter,” he said in the echo-chamber voice, and the movie camera started rolling again. It came in for a close-up of his own tense face, then switched over to observe her movements as she hovered uncertainly at the coffee table.

  “Well,” she said. “I’m going to have one more cigarette and then I must get the dinner on the table.” She sat down again—not leaning back this time, or smiling, for this was her busy, getting the-dinner-on the-table mood. “Have you got a match, Walt?”

  “Sure.” And he came toward her, probing in his pocket as if to bring forth something he had been saving to give her all day.

  “God,” she said. “Look at those matches. What happened to them?”

  “These?” He stared down at the raddled, twisted matchbook as if it were a piece of incriminating evidence. “Must’ve been kind of tearing them up or something,” he said. “Nervous habit.”

  “Thanks,” she said, accepting the light from his trembling fingers, and then she began to look at him with wide, dead-serious eyes. “Walt, there is something wrong, isn’t there?”

  “Of course not. Why should there be anything wr—”

  “Tell me the truth. Is it the job? Is it about—what you were afraid of last week? I mean, did anything happen today to make you think they might—Did Crowell say anything? Tell me.” The faint lines on her face seemed to have deepened. She looked severe and competent and suddenly much older, not even very pretty any more—a woman used to dealing with emergencies, ready to take charge.

  He began to walk slowly away toward an easy chair across the room, and the shape of his back was an eloquent statement of impending defeat. At the edge of the carpet he stopped and seemed to stiffen, a wounded man holding himself together; then he turned around and faced her with the suggestion of a melancholy smile.

  “Well, darling—” he began. His right hand came up and touched the middle button of his shirt, as if to unfasten it, an
d then with a great deflating sigh he collapsed backward into the chair, one foot sliding out on the carpet and the other curled beneath him. It was the most graceful thing he had done all day. “They got me,” he said.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  Readers will notice the conspicuous absence, in this volume, of the distinguished work of Raymond Carver. The editor regrets that Raymond Carver’s estate declined to allow his story “Elephant” to be included.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  MAX APPLE was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and received a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1970. He is the author of the story collections The Oranging of America, Free Agents, and The Jew of Home Depot and Other Stories; two novels; two nonfiction books; and several screenplays. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

  RUSSELL BANKS, a Massachusetts-born author, has published eleven novels, including Continental Drift, Cloudsplitter, and The Reserve, and five short story collections, including The New World, Success Stories, and The Angel on the Roof. He is the recipient of a John Dos Passos Prize, an Ingram Merrill Award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in upstate New York.

  DONALD BARTHELME (1931–1989) was born in Philadelphia but grew up in Houston. Originally a journalist, he moved to New York in 1961 and began writing fiction for publications such as The New Yorker. He published four novels and numerous volumes of short stories, of which Sixty Stories won the PEN/Faulkner Award. Barthelme was the recipient of many awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. He spent the last decade of his life teaching at the University of Houston, where he helped found its Creative Writing Program.

  RICHARD BAUSCH was born in Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1945. He has taught creative writing at several schools, including the University of Virginia, Beloit College, the University of Tennessee, Sewanee, and Bread Loaf, and is presently Moss Chair of Excellence in the Writing Program at the University of Memphis. He is the author of Peace, Hello to the Cannibals, The Last Good Time, Mr. Field’s Daughter, In the Night Season, Wives & Lovers, Something Is Out There, and many other books. His work has won two National Magazine Awards. Bausch is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a PEN/Malamud Award.

  ANN BEATTIE has written seven novels and eight short story collections, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, and The Best American Short Stories of the Century. She has received a PEN/Malamud Award, a Rea Award for the Short Story, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, four O. Henry Awards, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her most recent books include the novella Walks With Men and the collection The New Yorker Stories. Beattie currently teaches at the University of Virginia, where she is the Edgar Allan Poe Professor of English.

  T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE has published more than twenty books of fiction and short stories, most recently The Women, When the Killing’s Done, and Wild Child & Other Stories. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, The Atlantic, Playboy, and McSweeney’s, and his many honors include five O. Henry Awards, a PEN/Malamud Award, a PEN/Faulkner Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1978 he joined the faculty of the University of Southern California, where he currently serves as a Distinguished Professor of English.

  GEORGE CHAMBERS is the author of story collections The Bonnyclabber, The Scourging of W.H.D. Wretched Hutchinson, The Last Man Standing, and Null Set, and with Raymond Federman is coauthor of The Twilight of the Bums, a collection of short stories that was recently reprinted by Starcherone Press. His writing has appeared in December and elsewhere. He is a Professor of English at Bradley University.

  JOHN CHEEVER (1912–1982) wrote numerous short stories and four novels. His first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, won a National Book Award, and in 1978 the collection The Stories of John Cheever became the only work of fiction to win the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and at Boston University. Two collections of his writing were released by the Library of America in 2009.

  CHARLES D’AMBROSIO is the author of two short story collections, The Point (a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award finalist) and The Dead Fish Museum, and Orphans, a collection of essays. In 2006 he received a Whiting Writers’ Award and in 2008 he was awarded a Lannan Foundation Fellowship. He has taught creative writing for such renowned programs as the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. He is an Associate Professor of English at Portland State University.

  NICHOLAS DELBANCO is a novelist and a writer of nonfiction whose books include What Remains, The Count of Concord, and Anywhere Out of the World. His twenty-fifth book, Lastingness: The Art of Old Age, was published in 2011. Delbanco’s writing has earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowships. He has served as the Chair of the Fiction Panel for the National Book Awards, and has taught at Bennington College, Skidmore College, and the University of Michigan, where he was director of the MFA Program and continues to serve as Director of the Hopwood Awards Program.

  JUNOT DÍAZ won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008 for his debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Story, and The Paris Review, as well as in Best American Short Stories and PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. He teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a founding member of the Voices of Our Nations Arts Writing Workshop, which focuses on writers of color, and serves as the fiction editor for The Boston Review. In 2009 Diaz was a Millet Writing Fellow at Wesleyan University.

  ANDRE DUBUS (1936–1999) was a short story writer hailing from Lake Charles, Louisiana. His story collections include Dancing After Hours, Adultery and Other Choices, The Last Worthless Evening, and Finding a Girl in America. His novella We Don’t Live Here Anymore was made into a movie in 2004. During his lifetime he was awarded the PEN/Malamud Award, the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation.

  STUART DYBEK is the acclaimed author of the story collections Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, I Sailed with Magellan, and The Coast of Chicago, and the poetry collections Brass Knuckles and Streets in Their Own Ink. He received his MFA from the University of Iowa in 1973 and is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Northwestern University. His many awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, the Rea Award for the Short Story, a PEN/Malamud Prize, a Lannan Award, and a Whiting Writers’ Award.

  DEBORAH EISENBERG is the author of four story collections: Transactions in a Foreign Currency, Under the 82nd Airborne, All Around Atlantis, and Twilight of the Superheroes. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Rea Award for the Short Story, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, five O. Henry Awards, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. She teaches fiction writing at the University of Virginia.

  JEFFREY EUGENIDES was born in Detroit and attended Brown University and Stanford University. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published in 1993 and later made into a film by Sofia Coppola. His second novel, Middlesex, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Ambassador Book Award. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2008, he was editor of My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead, a collection of love stories which helped fund the free youth writing programs at 826 Chicago.

  RICHARD FORD is the author of the story collections Rock Springs, Women with Men, and A Multitude of Sins, as well as six novels, among them The Sportswriter, Wildlife, Independence Day, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and, most recently, The Lay of the Land, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Ford is at work on
a new novel and a collection of stories. He lives in Maine and New Orleans.

  EDWARD P. JONES is a writer from Washington, D.C. His novel, The Known World, won the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2004 and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2005. In 2006 he published his third book, All Aunt Hagar’s Children, a collection of fourteen stories that are linked thematically to his first collection, Lost in the City, from 1992. He teaches creative writing at George Washington University. In 2010 he received the PEN/Malamud award.

  JHUMPA LAHIRI is the author of three books: Interpreter of Maladies, a story collection and Pulitzer Prize winner; Unaccustomed Earth, a story collection; and The Namesake, a novel which was made into a movie in 2006. She is a Vice President of the PEN American Center and serves on the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. She lives in Brooklyn.

  THOMAS MCGUANE’s body of work includes novels, stories, screenplays, and essays. He finished his first novel, The Sporting Club, on a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and was nominated for the National Book Award for his novel Ninety-Two in the Shade. His other books include The Bushwacked Piano, Nobody’s Angel, Nothing but Blue Skies, and Gallatin Canyon, a story collection, while his screenplays include Rancho Deluxe, The Missouri Breaks, and 92 in the Shade (which he also directed). His novel Driving on the Rim was released in October 2010.