Thanksgiving Night

by Richard Bausch

  Gail, by contrast, seemed at times almost too bright—a cheerleader, a member of the drama club, the chess club, the literary magazine and school newspaper staff, the yearbook committee. The girl appeared to experience everything like a cat walking in weather, as Elizabeth put it once to Will; it was all outside her somehow. Of course, most of this was a front, a way of being brave, pushing through deep fears.

  So much has changed now for Gail, with her disastrous early marriage—

  and even that similarity between them has done nothing to deepen the connection. Gail’s angry all the time at something or somebody, these days.

  Well. Both offspring have suffered losses. Mark went with the same girl through high school and the first three years of college. The girl quit school and moved with her parents to the Midwest, and immediately after he graduated, he moved there to be near her. Three months after he arrived, she ran off and married a member of the Indianapolis Colts football team, a practice squad player (he’s now coaching high school in Seattle, where they live). Mark began dating the divorced woman with three children last year, but that hasn’t gone too well, either, and Elizabeth hears about it all from him, calling in his unex-pressed bitterness, drunk, from his little apartment in Indianapolis.

  At least, with Mark, there has been some kind of bond. Though his 184

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  voice over the phone, slurring, with its injured tone, its bafflement, often leaves her exhausted and wanting sleep, even if it’s the middle of the afternoon.

  All she has wanted is to be what they need.

  Will would say that she possesses an acute sense of the sufferings and troubles of others. Starving orphans on distant continents are not her direct responsibility, he has told her, only half-joking.

  For the worrying that she’s beset with often enough, her remedy has always been to lose herself in the society of others: when she suffers the dark, she desires company, finds herself healing inside simply from watching people talk. For Elizabeth, going out in the world and being with friendly others makes the melancholy give way the ineffable fraction of ground necessary for surviving it.

  At the bookstore, she finds Will talking to two men he sometimes plays poker with, Tom and Amos, both of whom work at the local travel agency. They’re cousins. The three men have poured drinks from a pitcher. Vodka and orange juice. They offer her one, and she decides to join them. Will has been telling them about the Crazies, and their present business of bifurcating their house. There’s something vaguely manic about him. He keeps glancing at her, talking about walls inside walls. There’s a strange, hard light in his eyes, and she thinks it’s because he’s had too much to drink so early in the day.

  Amos refuses to believe it about the house. This is a trait the cousins share, this tendency toward skepticism, no matter the subject. Now Amos’s cousin doesn’t go along—he’s skeptical about Amos’s skepticism. Elizabeth realizes that all three of them are crocked. She takes a last sip of her drink and excuses herself, saying she’s got work to do at home; she’ll come by in an hour or so. And, to her pleasant surprise, Will says he wants to close the store and come with her.

  “But you’re having drinks,” she says.

  “I want to come with you now, darling.” There’s something almost worried in his tone. She stares at him.

  “Whoa,” Amos says. “I guess we’re getting kicked out.”

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  “You can stay,” Will tells them quickly. “Just take whatever sales come up, and close up when you leave.”

  But they all leave. The cousins get into a little Yugo and pull away, and, watching them go, Elizabeth thinks there’s something unsteady about the car’s shocks. It’s as if the car, too, has been swilling vodka and is reeling. They go very slowly down the block and out of sight.

  “I hope they don’t get pulled over,” she says.

  Will shrugs, a gesture that reminds her disagreeably of Calvin Reed.

  She takes his arm and murmurs, “Let’s not go home.”

  “Where do you want to go?” There’s that odd light in his eyes. It worries her.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Sure. Where do you want to go.”

  “A hotel?”

  He stares at her, searching her face.

  “What’s wrong, Will.”

  He says, “Nothing. You tell me.”

  She sighs. “I want to go somewhere the Crazies can’t call us.”

  “Oh, I see,” he says. Apparently, he’s chosen not to take her seriously.

  “Will,” she says.

  “It’ll be all right,” he tells her.

  They get into the car, and he drives. Twice he heaves a deep sigh, as if he’s experiencing some queasiness.

  “Are you drunk?” she asks.

  “No.”

  She looks out the window at the street, thinking of places they might go. But then he turns up their street, and, in another moment, they’re home.

  Inside, she unplugs the phone, and he smiles. She thinks of this smile as the first thing she recognizes about him this afternoon. But then it goes away, and he looks down at his hands, shifting slightly. He puts his hands on her shoulders and draws her to himself. She receives the unsettling notion that he wants to keep from looking directly into her eyes.

  But then he pulls back slightly and does exactly that.

  “I love you,” he says. “So much.”

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  “Oh, baby,” she says.

  Now and then, even living through the shocks and horrors of a terrible century, people find themselves blessed with a perfectly glorious time, when it’s easy to believe that hunger will be assuaged forever, or political prisoners will be released after decades of captivity; a sweet turn of the clock hands brings tests that come back negative; a widowed mother of three wins an all-expenses-paid trip to sunny islands; a lot-tery ticket yields untold wealth for the local elementary-school janitor, who bought the ticket on a whim; and blissful, married love happens in unlooked-for circumstances and with unexpected abundance, while a whole evening passes in the city without a single incidence of human depredation or sorrow.

  This Saturday evening in Point Royal is like that. Or, at least, it seems so to Elizabeth.

  The phone stays unplugged. The Crazies don’t come over. The new neighbors keep to themselves. Elizabeth lies in her husband’s arms in bed, in the soft afterheat of their lovemaking, listening to the breezes murmuring in the eves of the house. A charming sound in the soft evening light though in the darkness it would seem scary, the echo of a haunting, ghosts in the gloomy angles of roof and wall. There’s a wonderful, time-frozen feeling about this charming, low-howling, windy dusk, as if the summer that has ended has been granted a permanent reprieve.

  It’s a lovely, stolen season, armor against the winter that is arriving.

  6.

  Alison sits in the waiting room of the Point Royal Hospital, with Kalie sleeping on her lap and Jonathan at her side. Across from her, Holly and Fiona sit, Holly knitting, Fiona reading a magazine. Fiona has her hair t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  in a knot on the very top of her head. Her eyes are fierce-looking, and Alison thinks it’s probably the brows, sharply curved like those of an eagle or a hawk. The green irises are a dark shade, like lake water after a rain. Holly has the same sharp brows, but something of the blue in her eyes softens the effect. Neither woman seems even slightly tired. Alison told them hours ago that it was all right to leave her, but they remain.

  They talk to Jonathan about what’s on television—not the waiting-room television but the world of television. Fiona knows all the sitcoms and talk shows well. Alison finds herself a little surprised at the amount of TV Jonathan has watched. He’s up to speed on most of it. Fiona exhibits an ability to slip into Jonathan’s world. It’s strange. At times, it’s as if the two of them are exact contemporaries. Wh
en Fiona excuses herself to go use the restroom and to call her great-nephew, Alison says to Holly,

  “She’s so good with them.”

  “That’s because she never got past the age of nine herself.” Holly’s voice seems lighthearted and full of affection. It’s as if she’s boasting about her aunt. “Believe me, I know.”

  Alison says, “My mother used to say that about my father.” She thinks about Oliver—it’s eerily almost as if she has to remember him from a distance. It frightens her. He’s in surgery, and has been for almost an hour. The MRI showed what the doctors called an incidental finding: Oliver’s carotid artery is almost completely blocked. They’re performing the surgery to correct this. Alison sits straight-backed, waiting, almost as if the powers of fate in the universe might help Oliver if she keeps her posture correct and is sure to keep everything else correct, too—there’s something propitiating about all of it. She adjusts the weight of Kalie in her lap. A little earlier, she called Marge to tell her about Oliver, and couldn’t get it all out. Marge broke down crying, believing that this was death news. It took a while to make her understand, and, in explaining everything, Alison began to feel as if this talk about full recovery was a kind of whistling in the dark; it was as if she might effect a bad outcome by talking about it so reassuringly to her friend. Marge’s unhappy where she is, and wants to come back, and can’t. Gregory has been almost impossible to get a hold of. Alison explained that she hasn’t seen him, and then said she had to go. Marge was still crying when she hung up.

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  The waiting room is small and painted an odd, ceramic-yellow color, dark, like congealed egg yolk. The television is suspended from an apparatus bolted to the ceiling; it hangs in front of a row of windows, so that anyone walking by in the hall outside can see the upturned faces of the people watching it.

  “Here,” Holly says, standing and leaning over Alison, reaching. “Let me take the baby for a while. You look tired.”

  Alison gives Kalie up.

  Fiona comes back, and she’s bought candy for the young folk, as she calls them, meaning Alison, too. Fiona bites into a Clark bar, and begins talking about her plans for living alone in a demarcated house.

  The completion of the division will have to be put off now. Fiona glides right past this, as if there is no question about Oliver eventually being able to finish. Holly nods encouragingly, holding Kalie and rocking slightly.

  “You’re both so kind,” Alison says.

  “Well,” says Holly. “We don’t have a lot to do. It’s good to be of help.”

  “I always thought that,” Fiona says.

  “I know you did, dear. Right from the start.”

  “Since I was a baby.”

  “She did,” Holly says to Alison. “She was a very helpful baby, weren’t you, Fiona? Fed herself. Changed her own diapers. Ran the vacuum. Made house calls to the sick. Everyone talked about it all the time.”

  Fiona says nothing.

  “Never cried or asked for anything. You could go for days without even noticing her, they said. Rotated everybody’s tires—like that, you know.”

  “I’ll try to call Will and Elizabeth again,” says Fiona in an even tone. She rises with exaggerated dignity and trundles on out of the room.

  “Sometimes she teases back,” Holly says.

  Jonathan turns on the television. There’s been an explosion and a fire at a plant in Detroit. The television news teams are swarming, heli-copters, vans, men and women standing in the foreground with micro-t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  phones held up to their mouths. Every channel’s the same. A spectacular fire and no injuries. For once, the lead story isn’t the president’s troubles, and Jonathan mentions this.

  “I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again,” Holly says. “You’re a very advanced young man.”

  “I keep up,” says Jonathan in a tone that Alison finds a little super-cilious. She gives him a look, but he doesn’t notice. He’s watching the television. They all watch for a while.

  “Do you sense that these news types are disappointed no one was hurt?” Holly asks.

  “My father hates them,” Alison says. “But I guess people have to make a living.”

  Fiona comes back. “Something must be wrong with the line. It rings and rings.”

  Kalie stirs and fusses a little, sleepily, twisting in Holly’s lap. Alison takes her, and she settles down again. They all watch the television, with its aerial view of the blaze.

  “It’s actually rather beautiful from a distance,” Fiona says.

  They talk about this phenomenon. Holly mentions that under a mi-croscope, some of the world’s worst organisms and toxins are quite exquisite to look at.

  Alison says, “Oh, could we change the subject, Holly?”

  Holly reaches over and touches the back of her hand. “I’m sorry.”

  They’re quiet. Others come in. The television racket changes to early-morning infomercials. Jonathan and Fiona watch it, eating more candy. Alison and Holly talk about Holly’s years working for the government and for the railroads as a secretary, and how it was back then, trying to form a union. Alison tells her about Teddy, and some about Marge and Gregory, and a lot about growing up, mostly alone with Oliver, who was always a little sad, and like a boy in so many ways, and such a wonderful lot of fun to be with. When Teddy left, it was all she could do to keep Oliver from doing some damage to him. Yet, when he understood that she wanted to try keeping a relationship with Teddy for the sake of the children, he became the picture of familial calm and amity. Even now, in Teddy’s absence, he refrains from talking about him.

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  restaurant in defense of a waiter who had been fired for dropping a tray of food. “A sense of justice,” she says. “That was the thing about him.

  I liked it in him, too. It wasn’t a pose.” She seems to ponder this, and something flickers in her eyes, a pang. She sighs and looks down at her hands. “Haven’t thought of him for a while,” she murmurs. “It’s surprising what stays with you.”

  “I’ve heard my father say that,” Alison tells her.

  At some point in the long night the doctor, a short, very thin, stooped man with black hair and dark eyes, comes in to tell Alison that her father is in recovery and is doing well. The stroke was mild, and the damage is slight—there’ll be a very mild aphasia, some small motor difficulties, all of which should fairly well correct themselves, some of it within hours or days. The discovery of the carotid-artery blockage was fortuitous, and that’s been corrected. All the other arteries are clear. Oliver can return home in a couple of days, if there are no further complications and if recovery proceeds as expected. The operation was a complete success, and the prognosis is excellent. Alison has come to her feet, and now she sits down again and begins to cry. Jonathan hurries to her side, as do Holly and Fiona.

  “When can I see him?”

  “Be a while,” says the doctor. “He’s sleeping now. And the sleep is restorative. And speaking of sleep, you might go home and get some yourself. I’m going to.”

  “I’m afraid to leave here.”

  “It’s going to be morning before you can see him.”

  Alison says nothing for a moment.

  “He’ll be fine,” says Holly. “You should get some rest, honey.”

  When Alison was small, and her mother had the aneurysm, she left the hospital with her father without talking to her. That afternoon, Mary slipped quietly away. It’s all happening again, and Alison can’t leave, won’t leave. “I’m staying,” she says.

  So, the waiting continues until well toward morning. The two ladies keep her company. Holly talks again about her last husband and the stone cottage in Scotland. But she’s cheerful now, clearly aiming to distract the younger woman. Fiona and Jonathan play tic-tac-toe. Be-t h a n k s g i v i
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  fore first light, they all slip into little noddings-off. Kalie sleeps soundly through it all.

  “Did I ever sleep that uncomplicatedly?” Fiona asks no one in particular. Then she sits forward and says, quite as if she’s just now discovering it: “I feel very good this morning. I feel useful. I don’t mean this in a bad way, but I like the feeling.”

  f a u l t

  1.

  While Elizabeth sleeps more peacefully than she has in years, Butterfield tosses and turns. She sleeps without dreams—or if she has dreams, say they are visions of abundance, a feast enjoyed on a brilliantly flowered veranda overlooking a tranquil emerald coastline, in the calming rush of white-topped waves rolling in from the sparkling, far-darkening, blue-green horizon; a gathering, by that same dream sea, of all the people she has ever loved, and everyone loving her back with the kind of perfection and uncomplicated profusion that is only possible, alas, in dreams.

  Butterfield does sleep a little, and then wakes up and remembers Ariana. No one will ever know. If you don’t tell anyone, then no one will ever ever know. It was wonderful and no one will ever know.

  Now, his beloved wife rolls over onto him and kisses him, and jokes about morning breath. For Butterfield, the joke contains a terribly distressing sense of the worm in the apple, but this is an old trait of his, now deepened, made worse by his present difficulty. Even when he was a boy—oh, so many years before he was an adulterer—the sight of a re-splendently lovely natural scene never failed to make him think about how that loveliness concealed decay and desperate struggles, every acre t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  of exquisite forest teeming with predation. Nature itself has always appalled him. He used to imagine how it would be to stumble onto Earth from some other reality, another home in the stars, only to find a world where creatures must eat other creatures in order to survive. Seeing the world from this imaginary sensibility always made him acutely aware of the relentless particulars of existence.

  He kisses Elizabeth on this summery, bright early morning and attempts to put down the blackness in his mind. No one will ever know.