The Hole We're In

by Gabrielle Zevin

  She was still ruminating over Brit and her troubles when they announced boarding.

  She was on the two-seat side of the coach section, and for the longest time, it looked as if no one would sit next to her, which would have been ideal. She was having some trouble being among people back then—bizarre moments of intimacy and confession alternated with long, sullen retreats—and when she was in the latter part of the cycle, she didn’t like people getting up in her business or questioning her or touching her too much.

  Just before the plane doors were locked, a man sat down beside her. He looked like the first man who looked like her father, though it wasn’t him. She was beginning to wonder if all business travelers of a certain age looked the same, if her father was of a class, a type hopelessly general and forgettable to anyone but the specific children one traumatized. “Whoa,” he said, “barely made the flight.”

  She said nothing. His timing was wrong. She was through with these men who looked like her father. She was through talking for the day. She closed her eyes and rested her head against the plastic window shade.

  “So, honey, tell me your life story.”

  “I’d just like to get some sleep, if you don’t mind,” she said.

  “Aw, come on. You’re no fun. I need some entertainment.”

  “I was born in some shit-kicking town you never heard of, and I went a million miles to some other shit-kicking town, and now I’m going back to the first shit-kicking town. The end.”

  He didn’t take the hint. He thought she was being clever, flirtatious even. “What’s the name of this shit-kicking town, darlin’?”

  “You never been there,” she said.

  “Try me.”

  “What difference does it make?” she asked. “They’re all the same.”

  “Just being friendly,” he said.

  “I never met a person on a plane who became a lifelong friend, have you?”

  “S’pose not,” he said. He realized that she hadn’t been being clever or flirtatious, so he put on a pair of headphones.

  By then, she was no longer tired. She attempted to read the airline’s in-flight magazine, but the only thing that struck her fancy was the Sudoku puzzle, and someone had already done it. She snuck a side-long glance at her seat mate’s pouch to determine if he was in possession of a virgin copy. That was when she noticed a woman in a burka sitting across the row and promptly passed out.

  Patsy had been having similar episodes for the last two months. It wasn’t like she thought the woman was a terrorist. It was just stress, she supposed. And fatigue. And a stomach that had suddenly turned weak on her. In any case, the blackouts had been pretty damned inconvenient when she was driving a truck in a war zone, but they were fine and even good while a passenger on a plane. When she woke up, she was in Chattanooga, a mere thirty minutes from good old Fort Living Room AKA home.

  Patsy on the Road

  HER HUSBAND WAS waiting for her just outside arrivals in the penlike area reserved for the nonticketed mob. The first thing she noticed was how fat he looked, and she wondered if he was thinking the same about her.

  “You look good, babe,” he said. “Healthy.”

  She presumed that meant fat.

  “You look like shit, Mags.” She swatted him on the ass.

  He came in for a kiss, but at the last second, she couldn’t. She just couldn’t kiss or even consent to be kissed. She dodged him and asked him where he had parked.

  “You wanna drive, Patsy?”

  “Nah, I been driving for months.”

  “You’re limping a little,” he observed.

  “Not too much.”

  “Car’s on level B of the garage,” he said. “Stairs or elevator?”

  “Elevator,” she replied. “No, stairs.”

  “Well, I wanna take the elevator,” he said upon arriving at the parking garage. “Your bag’s heavy as doomsday.”

  “Fine, I’ll meet you up there.”

  She opened the door that led to the stairwell while Magnum pressed the UP button for the elevator. The door swung shut behind her, and though he did not follow, Magnum yelled, “Why’re you always making things so difficult for yourself, woman?”

  ON THE PASSENGER seat was a basket of Betsy Ross snack cakes. “What’re those for?” she asked.

  “Aw, you know, in case you get hungry. It’s a long ride back to Buckstop.”

  “Damn, Magnum, you know how I feel about Betsy Rosses!” She despised the Betsy Ross Snack Cake Company. Her grievances included their so-called “health” granola bars, which contained 67 percent fat, and their use of animal by-products, which she found completely hypocritical in a company that was run by a sect of Christians who advocated a vegetarian lifestyle.

  “Yeah, I know, I know. But I got this friend who’s working there now, so I get a lot of free stuff.”

  She looked at his belly. “I can tell.”

  “Yeah, reckon I put on a few.”

  “A few? You’re gonna be one of those fat-ass gym teachers all the kids are laughing at behind their backs.” Her husband was indeed a gym teacher. When she told people what he did for a living, she usually omitted the word gym.

  “All right, Patsy.”

  “Magnum, I could be on a mother eff’n desert island, and I wouldn’t eat that crap.”

  “OK.”

  “Lord, it’s making me queasy even looking at ’em.”

  Her husband picked up the snack cake basket and set it tenderly on the backseat. He was chuckling in a way that had always annoyed her—softly as if asking her permission to laugh.

  “What’s so damn funny?” she asked.

  “Before, you said dessert island. Like, an island filled with desserts, you—”

  “Yeah, I get it.”

  “Thought you might appreciate the word play is all.” Magnum nodded and started the car. She told him she wanted to rest, and that’s what she pretended to do until they were almost back to Buckstop.

  In all the years she had lived in Buckstop, she had found precious little to recommend it. The town’s only attractions were the Buckstop Church of Sabbath Day Adventists, three schools (all run by the church), a handful of government traffic lights, the Betsy Ross factory, which was also owned by the church, a sign that let you know when you’d arrived, and another sign saying you’d left. She didn’t think the church owned the signs, but she wouldn’t have been shocked to discover the opposite was true, either. The first sign said YOU ARE ENTERING BUCK-STOP: IN GOD WE TRUST and featured a carving of a deer’s head and antlers. The sign to leave looked nearly identical except it depicted the deer from behind, and its message was YOU ARE LEAVING BUCKSTOP: DRIVE CAREFULLY, LIVE PRAYERFULLY. While the leaving sign did not specifically mention God, she had always felt that the implication was God help you if you are so foolish as to leave Buckstop. Besides Christians, the other thing Buckstop had was deer, which of course had been the inspiration for the town’s name.

  She knew everyone there, and everyone knew her. And if they didn’t know her, they certainly knew her father, who had become the town minister five years earlier, following the death of the old one and after Roger’s own epic midlife crisis. The church was the big show in Buckstop, and her father was a rock star. Not long after his appointment, she had begun referring to him as “Pastor Dad.”

  They were just driving past the YOU ARE ENTERING BUCKSTOP sign when a deer ran out in front of the car.

  “MAGNUM!” Patsy yelled.

  “What?”

  She could tell he didn’t see it. It was late and maybe he thought it was part of the sign come to life; she didn’t know and there wasn’t time to figure it out. She reached over Magnum and grabbed the steering wheel. Her instincts were quick from all those months driving in the desert.

  Magnum pulled the car the rest of the way over to the side of the road, and they sat there without saying anything for a spell. The deer regarded them, and they regarded the deer. As it lacked antlers, Patsy decided it mus
t be a doe. She thought it might have been with child because it looked rather thick through the middle. She didn’t get a long enough look to be sure, because Magnum turned off the headlights and the doe bolted.

  “Deer in the headlights,” he said. “You know, Patsy? Deer. In. The. Headlights.” He laughed. It was probably nervous laughter, but she took it the wrong way. Maybe she was just in the mood for fighting.

  “You’re a fucking idiot,” she said to him.

  “What?” he said.

  “You think it’s a goddamn laugh riot to nearly kill a living creature?”

  “Aw hell’s bells, Patsy-cake. You know I don’t think that. I was only trying to release tension, right?”

  She said nothing.

  “The thing is, Patsy, there’s an overpopulation problem. It’s throughout the whole county. You wouldn’t know it, ’cause you’ve been gone a long time. And people are even allowed to shoot them, but no one’ll shoot in Buckstop, ’cause your father and the SDAs won’t allow it. So, all the deer are coming to Buckstop.”

  “That ain’t no excuse, Magnum. You ought to be watching for them!”

  “Yeah, it was that dumb sign that confounded me.”

  “Who’s your friend?”

  “What? What friend?”

  “The friend who’s working at Betsy Ross? The one who’s trying to fatten you up like a goddamned Thanksgiving turkey.”

  “No one you would know,” he said after a pause she considered noteworthy.

  “I know everyone you know.”

  “Not everyone. Not anymore.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “You been gone a long time, Pats.”

  He was about to restart the car when she realized she had to throw up again. She got out of the car and christened the Tennessee soil.

  As she was vomiting, she thought about Britney Spears and whether the girl felt like an asshole for having married that jerk in the first place. Like all her friends and her family saying he was bad news and all of them having been exactly right. This line of thought led right back to her own husband. How he was probably having an affair with someone who worked at the Betsy Ross factory, the pride of Buckstop, Tennessee, the fifth-biggest snack cake factory in the US of A. He was probably having an affair with someone who wore a hairnet for at least eight hours a day. But whatever—she really had been gone a long time.

  “You OK?” he asked.

  “Motion sickness,” she claimed. “FUCK! FUUUCCCKKK! I FUCKING HATE THROWING UP!”

  “When’d you start cursing so much?”

  She shrugged. “Always cursed a lot.”

  “Yeah. S’pose it just never bothered me before.”

  Back on the road, Patsy considered the question Had her years in the service made her foulmouthed or had she always been foulmouthed? In trying to answer it, she was put in mind of a certain man with whom she had served. They had called him Smartie because he’d gone to West Point and, even more suspicious than that, could often be found reading. Worse, his selections had never been on the Typical (Male) Soldier Reading List, which she had observed to be limited to pornography, the Bible, and Tuesdays with Morrie. The first time she noticed his predilection, for instance, he was reading Tristram Shandy, which wasn’t something they read in her part of the world. The title had sounded clever to her, like ivy on a wall or bare skin under a pleated woolen kilt. When she asked him what the book was about, he replied, “How we can’t escape the circumstances of our birth.” She’d liked that phrase, “the circumstances of our birth,” and had often repeated it to herself.

  “You’re quiet. What you thinking about, Pats?” Magnum asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Well, you ever read a book called Tristram Shandy?”

  Magnum shook his head. “Was I supposed to?”

  Smartie had been in Special Operations, and she had sometimes shared a truck with him during her second tour when she had started working as what they called a lioness. (Muslim women didn’t necessarily take to being handled by American male soldiers, so Patsy’s job had been to act as a female go-between.) Her first or second night partnered with Smartie, he had said to her, “You’re one of those girl soldiers who likes to show how tough she is by cursing up a red storm, am I right?”

  She couldn’t disagree.

  “An honorary man.”

  “Listen, Smartie,” she had said, “I’m five foot one. I gotta be fierce.”

  AS THEY WERE pulling into the driveway, her husband said, “Uh, Patsy? There’re some folks at the house. It was gonna be a surprise, but you don’t exactly seem in the mood for surprises.”

  “Hell, Magnum.” She thought she had been very clear. She had told him several times, both in e-mail and on the phone, “NO goddamn homecoming.” Unfortunately, he had assumed her edict was of the particular feminine variety that was meant to be ignored: e.g., “You don’t have to buy me anything for my birthday” or “Have a good time with your friends.”

  She asked him if he could call the whole thing off, but it was too late. Her flight had been so delayed that the guests were already waiting.

  “It’s not like this big thing,” he assured her. “Just Lacey, and the Pharm, and—”

  “Not Mrs. Pastor, right?”

  He shook his head.

  “Or Pastor Dad, obviously.”

  “I ...,” he began. “Your mom said she’d see you later, and your dad said he’d see you in church.”

  Her shirt was speckled with vomit, and the fly of her jeans was being held together by a safety pin. She was in no mood to see people. “I told you I didn’t want no goddamn homecoming.”

  “Well, we ain’t gonna give you a crown, Patsy.”

  Despite herself, she laughed. By then, she’d grown tired of busting her husband’s balls anyhow, or maybe she was just tired. She told him to go in first and that she’d follow in about five minutes, after she’d changed her shirt. Once he’d left, she dug through her duffel bag, found a relatively clean T-shirt, and changed into it. There was nothing left to be done in terms of her beautification, but she still couldn’t bring herself to leave the car. She just sat there, wishing that her husband had left the keys in the ignition, because then she’d drive somewhere and maybe she’d never come back.

  After a half hour, her husband emerged from the house with arms raised in inquiry. She rolled down the car window and claimed she’d had a blackout, which wasn’t true, but could have been.

  As he moved to open the car door, she resisted the urge to lock him out.

  “Nice shirt,” he said.

  The shirt had LET THE MOTHERF*CKERS BURN across the front.

  “Nice sentiment.”

  “It was a gift.”

  “From who?”

  “Some buddy of mine. He got his face blown off.”

  “I can send everyone home if you want, honey.” She could tell he just wanted her to get the hell out of the car and go inside.

  “That’d be great,” she said.

  “But it’d be better if you just came in for a few minutes and said hi. Then I’ll tell everyone you’re tired and that’ll be that. Everyone’s real excited to see you, Patsy.”

  “I am tired,” she said.

  Patsy among Friends

  SHE THOUGHT THE festivities were a cross between a business meeting and a trip to a wax museum; perhaps, a wake. In any case, she felt conspicuously not the life of the party. For most of the evening, she was stilted and had trouble talking to more than one person at a time. Her eyes kept drifting to her wrist to rest upon a watch she no longer had. She had left it Over There, but she still had tan lines from where the watch had been.

  “Jesus, Helen, thanks for coming all this way,” Patsy said at the sight of her sister. She and Helen had never been close owing to the ten-year age gap between them, and she had not expected her there.

  “Well, I’m not gonna be able to make it back for Thanksgiving or Christmas, but I still wanted to see you, Patsy.”

  “S’p
ose you want me to ask why you ain’t coming back for the holidays,” Patsy said.

  “Really, Patsy ... Must you speak that way? We all appreciate how tough you are.”

  “So, why aren’t you coming back?”

  “Well,” Helen said with a knowing grin, “can’t you tell?”

  Patsy had no idea and was not inclined to guess.

  “I’m pregnant, you retard,” Helen said as she smacked Patsy playfully on the side of her head. “Five and a half months. In a couple of weeks, I won’t even be able to fly.” She lifted up her shirt and stuck Patsy’s hand against the bare skin of her belly, which was soft and round. It occurred to Patsy that the belly was unlike anything else on Helen that had ever been or would probably ever be again.

  “Goddamn, you’re still skinny as anything. I’m probably bigger than you,” Patsy said. She immediately regretted this comment as it potentially revealed more than she was prepared to discuss.

  She needn’t have worried. Helen was more interested in regaling Patsy with stories of her fertility woes than contemplating her little sister’s subtext. According to Helen, she and Elliot had been trying to get pregnant nearly as long as they’d been married, but no dice. So, Helen had gone to a fancy fertility doctor (“Patsy, he was on Good Morning America!”), and it turned out that a four-pound cyst was blocking one of her fallopian tubes. She had had the growth removed, but even then, the television doctor hadn’t known if she would be able to conceive. They continued with the expensive fertility treatments—“I honestly could have bought another house for what we spent!”—but still no luck. “I’d just about made peace with the idea of adoption. I’d started looking into the idea of getting one of those Katrina orphans, because, you know, they need homes, too. But then: a miracle!”

  “Not for the Katrina kid,” Patsy said.

  “Seriously, Patsy. If you and Magnum ever try to conceive, you ought to get yourself checked out for this cyst thing, PCOS, first. It’s hereditary.”

  “Uh, yeah ...” Patsy suspected fertility problems were one more thing she and her sister wouldn’t share.