He had met Barbara at, of all places, the community college, where she was an assistant instructor in some kind of real estate or insurance. She was right out of college and so he felt she was a good person to talk to about courses and credits. He never meant for anything to happen. It all started with one little cup of coffee. But didn’t Ruthie know that something had been wrong? Couldn’t she tell that things weren’t working? It wasn’t just the tension of the highway going to pot, it was more. Don’t you see, Ruthie, that it was more? No, no she couldn’t; she had always thought things were getting better.
Ruthie hasn’t gone after all the facts even though she is certain her mother could supply them. What she has come up with on her own is enough. Barbara is like 1-95. She is fast and lively and young, and Ruthie is 301, miles of tread stains and no longer the place to go. She imagines Barbara sidling up to Jim at school, her teeth clenched, jaw set in that tense way that suggests sexual frustration, bitterness, determination, or any combination of the three. She’s seen the look before, on dance floors, across the pool, window to window on the highway, but she’s never imagined Jim on one side of it. She’s never imagined that people would be whispering does his wife know? and the wife would be her. Now she can only suspect that there are people feeling sorry for her; there are people who see her as a loser and, thus, an easy catch. And this Barbara probably hates her with a passion, probably bristles with the sound of her name or the thought of her home even though they’ve never even been introduced.
“Bump bottoms!” Frieda sprays a mouthful of water, her hair sticking up all around her head in hundreds of cowlicks. Rodney is tossing a clay clod high into the air and counting the seconds before it drops. The sun is disappearing now, this very second, and before it does, Ruthie goes and switches on the pool lights, round circles of white light bringing cheers from the girls. When she squats to tell them that they can only swim ten more minutes, she breathes in the heavy chlorine, enjoying the odor as if it is bleaching every tiny hair in her nose, purifying her system.
“Good night now,” Mrs. Andler calls and waves a rolled-up magazine. She holds on to the door facing as she slowly pulls herself into the room, the gray of her TV buzzing on to light the room before she closes the door.
The sun disappears behind the cracked billboard of the Budget Motel, leaving the empty pool out front dark like a crater. Watching the deserted building makes Ruthie’s skin tingle, makes her shiver, even though it is still eighty-odd degrees. And then, after what seems like an eternity of silence, there are headlights coming down 301, familiar in shape and speed. Rodney has counted very fast to get to fifteen before his clay hits the concrete around the pool and shatters.
“Bump bottoms!” Frieda screams while the car turns in slowly, past the faded sign and into a space at the end of the lot. Ruthie concentrates on the pool, the water an odd shade of aqua green with the white lights shimmering beneath. It’s the shade of green that makes her think of the 1940s, her own parents moving to the music of Glenn Miller. It makes her think of black-and-white tile floors and the sound of a saxophone. Frieda is standing in the shallow end wiping the water from her red eyes. Rodney has stopped throwing and is staring. She knows he’s behind her now, and she watches Frieda’s friend hold her nose and squat to the bottom. She focuses on the lights, round white lights like moons, like what she’d imagine on another planet, an empty barren planet. Maybe he’s come home. Maybe this is it.
“Hey, kids,” he says, and she jumps with his voice, not fully believing that he is really there. She turns and looks at him then, hands in the pockets of his jeans, hair neatly combed, face shaven, new knit shirt. Rodney has sidled up to him like a puppy and now is giving a play-by-play of every Little League game since his dad left home. Jim’s hand is on his back. Frieda runs a circle around him, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, and then jumps back in the pool. “Hi,” he says, and Ruthie mouths the word back to him.
“Can we have another ten minutes?” Rodney asks, looking first at his dad. “Just ten?”
“Just ten.” Ruthie stands. She stares in the pool as Frieda and her friend try to sit crosslegged on the bottom. Then she takes a step towards him, watching her feet so as to bypass the wet puddles and clumps of clay. Have you come home? She imagines herself saying the words and is just about to when she glances over at his car and sees a silhouette, a headful of curly curls. The sight makes her own hand fly up to her head, the flat bangs, the back yanked up with a silver barrette. There is no white gauzy dress but a loose cotton shift, paint splattered and smelling of chlorine.
“I thought you’d be up in the house,” he says and steps closer, seeing that she has seen, maybe knowing what it was she was about to say. “Ruthie?” The sound of him questioning her name makes her breathe quickly and when she looks up he has stepped even closer, close enough to touch. “Are you okay?” With every word out of his mouth, she feels herself drawn closer. This is that old feeling, that lean-against-the-locker-and-whisper-secrets-about-the-rest-of-your-lives feeling, that surge of friendliness and excitement that comes with the uncertain future, the uncrossed threshold. She has an urge to hit him, to hug him, and she knows her jaw is set in that same tight way that she has seen and despised in other women. She knows when she looks him in the eye that he is seeing all of this in her and, whether he likes it or not, he is feeling something similar. He may not be thinking about hanging the NO VACANCY sign or a night they spent in the honeymoon suite. Maybe he never thinks about lying in that small camper or about after the Labor Day picnic the beginning of their senior year when they snuck into the dark woods along the road and lay on a blanket, the large drive-in screen in the distance, Doris Day rushing around in silence. But he’s got to be thinking and feeling something. He couldn’t just stop thinking.
“So, did you give Mrs. Andler a contract?” He asks and stares into the pool where Frieda’s friend is splashing her arms and legs in an attempt to turn a back flip.
“Yes.” She feels brave and looks at him but his eyes are still on the pool. “I told her no loud music, no pets, and no men after midnight.”
“Kind of strict.”
“Based on a recent incident.” She walks to the edge of the pool and is about to call the kids out, her heart pounding, head light and still ringing with the words she had not planned to say.
“I came to get some things,” he says now, and again steps closer. “I had really thought you’d be up at the house at this time.” Had he hoped that he’d find her in the house? To have her alone, out of Barbara’s vision? To talk to her? To be with her? “You know, Frieda usually is getting ready for bed about now.”
“Guess you can’t always be too sure about what’s usually going on.” She glances over at the empty front seat of his car (had she imagined the woman?) and then turns back to him, eye to eye, and steps closer. She feels powerful all of a sudden, like she did years ago at that prom when she danced with him while long-nailed Linda was in the bathroom. This is how Barbara must have felt when she sauntered into number fifteen and stepped out of her clothes. Ruthie is close enough to put her hand on his, to wrap both hands around his throat and squeeze, to pull him close, but all thoughts are interrupted (haven’t they always been interrupted?) by the splash of a cannonball, Rodney firing himself into the deep end, a wave of water cresting over the side.
She waits until the pool settles, feels his arm brush against hers as they stare over at the Budget Motel and the large NO TRESPASSING sign. “I need to go up to the house for a while,” he whispers, and she feels the hair on her neck standing. “Go with me.”
“Don’t you have a date tonight?” she asks, her voice much weaker than she had intended. That’s what she had asked him while they were on the dance floor, poor Walter keeping a vigil by the Kool-Aid-like punch, Linda in the doorway scanning the crowd.
He sighs and for a split second it looks as if he’s going to reach for her hand, but he catches himself. No response. Rodney is counting now, a clod of dirt sailing upw
ards and then returning with a splat on the wet concrete. “You really should work on your style,” she continues, gaining strength from every piece of dirt that flies. “A bird in the hand doesn’t necessarily apply to people. Chances are you may find an empty nest.”
“So maybe I will,” he is saying, the back of his hand brushing hers. “Work on my style, I mean.” It seems like an eternity that they stand there, his arm finding its way around her waist. She is thinking that it’s too easy, that she needs to make things harder. It’s always been so easy, as easy as forgetting about Walter, as easy as holding his hand and letting him pull her up and away from the lot of the drive-in where they spread a blanket over the damp pine straw. But hadn’t she also pulled him, hadn’t they pulled each other into a life that took shape so fast they hardly had time to think about it? Couldn’t it just as easily have been her to fall into something? And if it hadn’t been for her crazy rooms and their decorator colors, she probably would have noticed that something wasn’t right. Her mind free of paint fumes and drapery patterns, and she might have fallen into something herself; she would have at least considered it, some smooth-talking white collar man to buy her something extravagant every April. They were young people leading an old life, complete with commode bars she had recently ordered for Mrs. Andler’s room. But it’s not over. She turns quickly and wraps her arms around him, as if on the dance floor or stretched out on the ground. She stares at the car, now certain that there never was anyone there. She thinks of Linda in her awful purple dress as she stood in the doorway of the gym, light from the hall illuminating her like some kind of out-of-date paper doll.
“God, what was I thinking?” he asks but she remains silent, lets her jaw relax. There will come a day when it will seem like it never happened, just as it sometimes surprises her to recall how the motel first looked, those bare dirty rooms. Somewhere along the way their vows to the justice of the peace, who was dressed in Bermuda shorts and a baseball jersey, have taken on the formal glow of a big church wedding, and their nights in the cramped camper have become hours of late-night talks and lovemaking and side-splitting laughter. And in a few years when they’ve sold the property and moved to Columbia, when Jim has graduated and Rodney writes to tell Malcolm that none of his predictions came true and Frieda is begging to wear makeup and stay out late, they will talk about the Goodnight Inn and how wonderful it was to live there, the traffic a steady flow of honeymooners and college kids and families in wood-paneled station wagons bound for the coast. They will almost forget these three lousy weeks. She listens to Rodney counting higher than he has all day, his pieces of dirt soaring into the sky, and she watches Frieda swim up to one of the round hazy lights, her small hand reaching for the moon.
First Union Blues
I’m sitting here at work knowing full well that the Mr. Coffee that my cousin Eleanore gave me for Christmas is going full blast and there’s not a thing I can do about it. I knew as soon as I pulled into the parking lot that I forgot to turn it off. I knew when I looked up at our sign here in front of the bank that gives the time and temp; it said 80 F and I thought, hot, Jesus it is hot, blazing hot, and since I have a fear of fire and have my entire life since I saw the movie Jane Eyre, I happened to think of the Mr. Coffee and how I had thought I might want to drink that little bit there in the bottom after I put on my makeup and somehow in the midst of mascara and cover up, my mind wandered right on into wanting to wax my legs and see how it did. “It hurts like hell,” Eleanore has said and that’s what I was thinking right up until I parked and saw the time-and-temp sign.
I don’t tell anybody this but I’ve yet to learn the C temp and how to figure it out and so I always have to wait around for the F one. What bothers me is that some days waiting for the time to flash up is like waiting for Christmas and other good days—before you can make it out (all the dots don’t always work), it’s all changed on you. That’s how it was this morning. I don’t know who here is in charge of that sign; I’m not. I’m a teller, which they tell me is “a foot in the door,” “a base to grow upon,” and so on. A check to pay off Visa is more like it.
There’s nothing I can do about the Mr. Coffee right this second. I barely get a coffee break and I know they aren’t going to let me drive clear across town to check on something that I might or might not have done. It’s happened before that I have thought the oven was on and such, only to find that I had turned it off without even knowing. “I live by my instincts,” I’ve told Eleanore and that’s true. And so I could’ve cut it off, instinctively. All of us have done things instinctively only to find out we didn’t remember doing it. Some people spend years that way.
Eighty-two degrees Fahrenheit. I can read it loud and clear, not a dot out of place, and I know that any minute now that condo I rent is going to bust into flames. It starts there at the Mr. Coffee, wedged right between the microwave and the wok: a little piece of paper towel ignites, catches hold of my new Dinah Shore kitchen rags, which are just for show and stay dry as a bone since my condo has a dishwasher and I let the dishes air dry. It spreads from there past the condo’s miniblinds to my little oil lamp that says “Light My Fire” and that I won at a fair once for hitting a woman’s big round butt with a beanbag. I never would’ve picked that lamp but free is free and so I took it and went ahead with Larrette over to the funny mirrors, which is all she wanted to do. “Fat,” she would say and hide between my legs. She is only two and doesn’t have many more words than what she saw in the mirrors—big, little, funny, and of course, kitty and puppy. There weren’t any animals at the fair but those are her favorite words. If she likes something she’ll call it kitty. If I could rig up some mirrors at home like that, she’d stay busy for hours but I’m not real sure how it’s all done, which I guess is why you only see them at a fair or someplace special. I bought a little compact at Woolworth’s that was on the sale table, and that mirror was so bad and wavy, I just knew Larrette would love it. She threw it to the floor and it cracked and sparkled all over the condo kitchen. “Seven years, puppy,” I said to her but I’m not worried. I figure I’ve had my seven already.
Larrette is my daughter by Larry Cross of Shallotte, North Carolina, and he is—cross I mean. So we never see him at all, mainly because he lives in California doing odd jobs. “The sea is in my blood,” he used to say just because he grew up in Shallotte, which is nothing but a spit from the ocean. And I told him that, yeah, if stretching out in the sun with little to no clothes on, sipping a Bud, and riding the waves is what it takes to have the sea in your blood, well then, yeah boy, I’ve got it in mine, too. “Only that kind of blood calls for money,” I told him. “The average American cannot sunbathe straight from May to September.” I meant due to finances, of course, but I couldn’t even if I was Jackie O. because I’m fair-skinned; a strawberry blonde almost always is and my dermatologist tells me that skin cancer is bad in this area. That’s probably one reason right there why I instinctively took up with Larry Cross. He had the tan that I had never had; he could have passed for Spanish if he could have kept his mouth shut which he couldn’t. Open his mouth and Shallotte was written all over him.
I tell people that Larry Cross does odd jobs in California, when the truth is that I have no earthly idea what he does and I didn’t when I was staying there with him in Fuquay-Varina. I think he must’ve dealt in drugs or something underhanded from the looks of the people who would appear at my door at all hours of the night and day when decent people are either at work or at home watching TV.
I never married Larry Cross because I wasn’t about to saddle myself with trash. I say that now, but I guess there were some times when I thought we would get married; I guess I was thinking that when I was carrying Larrette and he was so proud of himself for getting me that way. And just as soon as Larrette had popped out Larry went and bought himself a surfboard with no surf whatsoever there in Fuquay-Varina (my instincts told me it wouldn’t work). There were bills to pay which I had always paid and he was over there
drinking a beer and listening to the Beach Boys singing, “Catch a wave and you’re sitting on top of the world.”
“What’re you going to do come low tide?” I asked him. What we had wasn’t a home, so one day I just up and left, me and Larrette. We moved to Raleigh and stayed with Eleanore until I got my job here. Then before I knew it, I was going to the state fair and living in a condo with a wreath on every wall and a big hooked rug that I bought at the outlet mall over near the airport. That place has got everything you might want and then some. Everything.
If that oil lamp catches fire, it’s all over. Everything I own will bust right into flames and I’ll have to start all over putting my life into perspective. And I like that word—perspective—it can make something sound a lot more important than it is. Not that I don’t value my life, because I do, but sometimes I wish that I could spread it all out on a piece of paper and take some Wite-out to it. Larry Cross would be the first to go. I tell people (if they happen to ask) that he does odd jobs in California. I don’t tell them that I think he’s a drug pusher because that would stick and get turned right back around and follow me like gum on a shoe wherever I may go in this life. They’d say, “That’s Maureen Dummer, who works as a teller and used to live with a pusher down in Fuquay-Varina,” and I can’t have that. Now people just say things like “That’s Maureen Dummer, who works down there at the First Union Bank; she’s the teller with the strawberry-blond hair that looks a tiny bit like Krystle Carrington off Dynasty. She has a cute little girl by the name of Larrette. No, she’s a single parent.”
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