Thanksgiving Night

by Richard Bausch

  But, quickly enough, the boy shifted to other enthusiasms: basketball, football, wrestling. About his absent mother he was even less forthcoming than Gail. His night problem was sleepwalking. He would get out of bed and come downstairs and stand in the front hallway as if waiting for someone to come through the door. His aspect was exactly that expectant look of a person who has heard the doorknob turn and is responding to the sound: the front door of the house opening. Coming home. This happened often enough for Butterfield to seek some explanation of it from a psychiatrist, who told him that traumatized children often develop patterns of sleepwalking, and that it would pass. But it kept happening. And the boy had no memory of it after waking, and would not talk about his dreams or his worries or anything much else.

  He was outwardly all boy—rough-and-tumble, headlong, prone to minor cuts and bruises. One summer evening, he broke his arm from a fall while running. He had gone to a neighbor’s yard to play hide-and-seek with some boys who lived in the neighborhood. Mark had come upon an unevenness in the ground and tumbled forward; he just hit wrong. Butterfield drove his son to the emergency room, Mark bracing his injured arm with the good one. The broken arm was elongated unnaturally by the injury, which was just above the wrist, and the forearm went off at a terrible angle.

  “It’s okay to cry, if it hurts,” Butterfield told him.

  “It hurts like a bitch,” the boy said through his teeth.

  But he didn’t cry until they hooked him up to an IV and the anes-thetic dripped into him. Then, losing consciousness, he closed his eyes tight, and the tears ran out of the corners of them, as if the relaxation of nerves had allowed to flow at last what he had been so bravely keeping back. Then was when Butterfield might’ve been able to speak to him about his mother. He thought this, sitting on a bench in the waiting t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  room, with Gail, who slept, head resting on the seat back, mouth open, looking stricken, years older than fifteen, and she wasn’t old enough, really, to see this as anything but life. Her life. He patted her shoulder, lifted her slightly, and leaned down to kiss her hair.

  Later, when she was awake, she worried aloud about her brother.

  “Will he be able to come home, do you think?”

  “Of course,” Butterfield said. “That’s why we’re waiting.”

  “They won’t keep him overnight.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t go to The Heart’s Ease.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Good.”

  The television in the room was on, and the newspeople were rattling on about a coal fire in a mountain somewhere, which had been burning for twenty years. She watched it intently.

  “Do you want to change the channel?” Butterfield asked her.

  “No,” she said simply. “Unless you want to.”

  “Maybe there’s something funny on.”

  She shrugged.

  His children, he realized, were unreachable. They were clearly suffering the loss of their mother, and he couldn’t find the way to be everything that they needed. In fact, it seemed that they were faring better than he. Nights were long and restless. Disbelief kept him awake for weeks; and then it was belief that did so. He watched the children for signs, and then realized one morning while he made breakfast for them that they were watching him. It stunned him. He looked up from slipping pancakes onto a platter on the dining-room table, to see that they were both staring. And, of course, they looked away immediately.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Mark said after a pause.

  Butterfield realized that he had been whistling, and that it had surprised them to hear this coming from him. “Hey,” he said. “It’s a beautiful morning.”

  “Whatever,” Gail said.

  “Do you want to talk about anything?”

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  “Like what, Dad.”

  “Well, your mother.”

  She looked at him as if he had asked her to remove her blouse; there was truly something outraged and appalled about it. “No,” she said.

  They ate in silence for a time, and then Mark, still wearing a cast on his right arm, began talking about trying to get the arm healed enough to go out for baseball.

  Through the months, they navigated the strange, depthless waters of their unexpected journey together. Butterfield sought to encourage them whenever they seemed lighthearted. He took them places and spent time with them.

  And then he was himself involved in another life, thinking of getting married again.

  For a little while after the first Elizabeth disappeared, he entertained the idea that she’d been forced to write her message across the mirror, those sweeping strokes in the letters notwithstanding; she’d been kid-napped and maybe subsequently killed. He saw her lying in a ditch somewhere, a victim of the random violence of America during the last of its supposed best century. But the police didn’t take very long to con-clude that this was a case of someone wanting to vanish: she’d used her credit cards to build up a store of cash and canceled accounts or paid them off weeks in advance of the day she walked away. Clearly, she’d planned it all out, and the scribbled message on the restroom mirror had certainty and determination, and even happiness in it, rather than any distress. Her very silence now seemed to say get on with it, get on with your lives and never think of me again.

  This was never exactly possible, of course.

  There were bad, bad days of trying to get used to her absence while attempting to assuage, in his own bafflement and hurt, the uncomprehending pain of the children. He would never have believed that he, a grown man, could lie, despairing and tearful, alone in his bed at night, suffering while they slept, ashamed of himself for all of it, feeling somehow as though he were at fault, but lacking the slightest insinuation of an idea as to why, and powerless to stop it or to change it. Sometimes he even woke up crying—and how disconcerting, how deeply confidence-t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  shattering it was to find himself coming out of unconsciousness weeping. For a time, when he was with friends, he caught himself hauling out photographs of himself with the absent wife, unable to keep from seeking reassurance against the suspicion that another man, someone with a finer sensibility perhaps, would have seen it coming; this other, more capable man might’ve been able to prevent it, head it off, by perceiving something, some shade of it all, in her face. “Does she look happy, there? She’s smiling, isn’t she? You see anything wrong? Would you say that’s a happy woman?”

  Of course, Mark and Gail, being children, attributed the whole matter to something they had done. He had to find ways to make them believe that it had been aimed at him and not really the children; that their mother’s leaving had come from the extreme of what she felt toward him. But this wasn’t quite true, and the children knew it. She had left them, too, had found her life with them to be too much, too.

  No one had seen it coming. As the months and years wore on, and the three of them had the usual troubles with setting boundaries during adolescence, the abdication on her part seemed all the more directed at each of them. Gail especially had trouble with it, and her one marriage—her o’er hasty marriage, as Butterfield then called it—

  was probably an unconscious reaction to the whole thing: she had been abandoned, her father was someone whose failure to understand her was painful and complete, and so she sought affection in the arms of the boys who came along. And she married young, at nineteen. Her choice was unfortunate, to put it kindly. An over-tall, thin-faced wretch with pretty, black hair and a fearful case of the shies. Literal-minded, and usually mute as a stump. A basketball hero with no other skill, and with half her brains. His name was Phil, and he’s long gone.

  Mark, too, has had his troubles with relationships over the years—

  the main feature of his personality being the belief that no one will stay, that he himself is not lo
vable as himself (while most of us have sub-scribed to this view in company, inwardly we have also been taught to believe that we are, in fact, our own reward; it is a common enough notion, isn’t it? to believe that if we end a relationship, the one left behind will not survive the loss). The sorrowful thing for Butterfield is that 104

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  poor Mark lacks Gail’s stridency and toughness. Whereas Gail got angry and is evidently planning a lifetime of getting even, Mark sleeps much of the time when he visits, watches too much television, and drinks too much wine.

  On Memorial Day of this past year, he had too much shiraz and ended up sitting in a bathtub of cold water with a headache, while everyone else ate grilled burgers and hot dogs. And that night, late, he explained to Butterfield that his present relationship, which had looked for all the world like the real, true thing, was ending. The woman in question was downstairs, sleeping on the living-room floor with her children, who had gone a good distance toward wrecking that room and the front porch. One of them, a girl, had run through the house with a lighted sparkler, and when Butterfield took it away from her, she kicked him in the shin. Butterfield bounced around in his living room with a sparkler shooting fire from him, trying to take hold of his hurt leg. The girl waited a beat, adjusted her angle, and kicked him again, this time in the other shin. Elizabeth and Holly pulled her away.

  Holly took the still-burning sparkler, and Butterfield sat on the sofa to hold his shins, both of which were already showing the welts that would turn into bruises. Nothing could’ve pleased him more than to throw the child, burning, out a window overlooking rocks and pounding surf.

  And knowing that this woman and her children would not be joining the family made him very happy, sorry as he was for Mark—who was, indeed, grieving the loss, and believing, again, that no one would ever settle on him or find him.

  But he makes his way, too. He has never been unemployed for more than a week, and he’s evidently very good at designing Web sites. If he spends a large part of his salary paying for visits to one psychologist or another, and if his bookshelves are full of self-help volumes and diet cookbooks (sometimes Butterfield wonders if he’s not anorexic, though he knows this is a disease of young women), it’s no one’s business but his own.

  In his son’s estimation of things—and this is with the help of several doctors of psychiatric medicine—he has and always will have abandonment issues (his expression, or, rather, that of the doctors), as do Butt h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  terfield and Gail. The hard thing to accept gracefully is the assumption on Mark’s part that any conflict arising between them comes from there.

  This has also angered Gail, whose anger is probably too steady to be healthy. Elizabeth has told Butterfield that she pictures Gail with an IV, except that the thing dripping into her veins isn’t plasma or sucrose but bile. “She’s on a bile drip,” Elizabeth will say. “It’s what keeps her going.”

  He met her—the good Elizabeth, as he sometimes teasingly calls her—during parents night at Mark’s middle school, his ninth-grade year. She spoke to him about how bright Mark was, how much fun he was to have in class, and something about the faintly crooked shape of her mouth made him think of touching her lips. It was plain tactile curiosity at first, not sexual, like wanting to run one’s hands over the back of a cat.

  “Are you seeing anyone?” he said and was surprised at his own forwardness.

  She said, turning, “Well, yes there are still several sets of parents—”

  “No,” he said. “I meant—you know. As in dating.” His voice shook.

  It was this tremor, she told him later, that had moved her to say, with a slightly sardonic smile, what was at the time an outright lie. “No, as a matter of fact, I’m not seeing anyone as in dating.”

  Over these mostly sweet years together, their complications have always felt like matters they could see through or beyond, some solution or relief awaiting them, like the proverbial clearing in the woods or the light at the end of the tunnel. And then the Crazies moved into the house on Temporary Road.

  2.

  For Elizabeth, the first part of the school year is always the hardest. The paperwork is roughly what it might be for the creation of a small independent state. The meetings go on and on, and, during all of this, there are, surrounding her—each one demanding individual attention and 106

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  assuming she has no life or purpose except to supply it—the hundred and thirty-odd nascent salesmen, Rotary Club presidents, truck drivers, bums, homemakers, mechanics, secretaries, doctors, lawyers, soldiers, ac-countants, artists, broadcasters, adulterers, victims, and criminals, whose heaped frustrations and hormonal frenzies constitute all of life in these rooms: the prodigious, outlandish energy for which no outlet is quite as alluring as all the forms of mischief, not to say devastation.

  The school itself is housed mostly in the new wing, which appears to be close to the ground, because the back wall of it is partially submerged in the side of a hill. It looks to Elizabeth like a brick-and-aluminum bunker or redoubt, a postmodern stronghold with a ribbed, dark brown metal roof. Over the door is a long, narrow rectangular panel inscribed with large letters in bas-relief: we are strongest when we are seeking to know. Beneath this is a cloth banner, showing a black horse rearing—it’s the silhouette of a horse, really—and the words the mustangs in bright red letters suggesting English heraldry.

  The main building, the original building, is a tall, gabled, nineteenth-century manse flanked by a gigantic spreading oak and a small, fenced graveyard where the victims of an eighteen-seventy-eight cholera epi-demic are buried. This was a teacher and his entire family, apparently—

  three little boys, two girls, a wife, and the wife’s elderly parents, all of whom died within weeks and sometimes hours of each other. The school, back then, was in this one building, and all the classes were taught by the same stern-looking, morally assured gentleman whose picture is engraved in the wall of the entrance, and whose mortal remains lie in eternal peace with his family under the shade of the oak tree. It is always eternal peace, and it is always acceptable with the passage of time.

  It doesn’t seem tragic or wrong or even quite so terrible—there seems nothing particularly unjust or unbearable about it now, because it was a hundred years ago, awful as it must have been, and is accomplished, and now the unfortunate lot of them are buried in the quiet shade of the yard. The man’s name was Briarly, and the building is now called the Briarly Building. Elizabeth likes the old place better than the new wing, and her classroom is off the big hall upstairs, where a leaded window overlooks the lawn and the little graveyard. She has her own desk t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  and computer. In the desk is a drawer full of over-the-counter medicines, papers, makeup and combs, and mementos from former students—letters and cards, mostly—all of this under lock and key, because she has to vacate the room in the middle of the day for the traveling teacher, or floater, whose name, oddity of oddities, is James Christ. He pronounces the last name as the first syllable of Christmas is pronounced, but the spelling is there. Elizabeth imagines his parents deciding on a first name beginning with the letter J. What can they have been thinking? James Christ never talks about his name, other than to point out its proper pronunciation, and Elizabeth has yet to gather the courage to ask him about it: he’s so direct and immediate about the pronunciation (Elizabeth can’t help but pronounce it in her mind as it is spelled). Mr. Christ arrives punctually at one o’clock with a cart and his own lesson plans and materials. His manner is hesitant and humble, and there’s the look about him of general discouragement that comes to the faces of the itinerant and the rootless—especially (Elizabeth has had the thought) when they carry the stigma of being named for the redeemer of all human-kind. The fact is, she often feels fairly rootless, too, for she has to make space for him and take her work with her down to the library
to sit and grade, or prepare lesson plans, or answer memos.

  She’s allowed less than thirty minutes for lunch, the administrators long ago having understood that children in the throes of changing into adults require constant busyness to protect them from themselves.

  There’s enough pure human electricity in a room full of these change-lings to solve all the hemisphere’s energy problems.

  After lunch, she has to do STOP duty (Student Time Out Place).

  This is a room with stalls for individuals to sit in and study, and it’s where they’re sent as a last resort before being suspended from school.

  Here is where she must watch over the defiant, the troubled, the sleepy, the alienated, the unfortunate—the intellectually, emotionally, and, at times, spiritually, halt and lame. Many of these particular students, given the circumstances of their lives and the conditions of daily life in a public school, have her best sympathy, which is, doubtless, more sympathy than they get anywhere else in their lives, and they know it.

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  even more forms can be filled out. She goes through homeroom, where the intramural television student newscast is played to a chattering group of nonparticipants in the civil life of the school, and then starts her morning class with a writing exercise, so she can see how far she has to go—how desperate will be the climb, scaling the alp of nonunderstanding in the room before her. This affords her a little time to go over the massive load of paperwork. Along with the forms for upcoming parent conferences, there are reports to legal authorities about her juvies, as they are called. These are children who have been in trouble with the law—which is fairly common these days, nothing new.

  Once, a couple of years ago, she had a boy, Jerry Bergenstein (she’s learned to remember names, hundreds of names), who ended up taking part in a heist where weapons were brandished. He was tried and sentenced as an adult and is now spending the first part of fifteen years at the state correctional facility in Norfolk. Elizabeth sometimes still receives letters from him. The kid was never really such a bad boy: he had a sense of humor, and she believes that no one with a sense of humor is ever unredeemable. Long before the heist, when he was only fifteen, he got in trouble with the authorities at school. At an all-classes assembly about sexual hygiene, where a film was shown about the dangers of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, a man gave a lec-ture about puberty and the changes attendant upon it, and, when asked about masturbation, explained that it was perfectly normal, nothing to be ashamed of, but that if the urge came too often, one should think about taking a cold shower to help keep it to a minimum. As the session ended, Jerry Bergenstein yelled out, “Last one to the showers is a rotten egg,” and for this harmless joke was suspended from school. Elizabeth still believes he would not be in prison now if it weren’t for the fact that this minor transgression was so severely punished—by the assistant principal at that time, Mr. Sellars, who went on to the school board in one of those trajectories reserved for the coldhearted, the efficient, the humorless, and the tireless.