Medication was on Imelda’s mind as she crossed the Walmart parking lot with her brand-new prescription. She was remembering how her mother always said she had been saved from the overdose that day not so much by the hospital staff as by her aunt Agnes Juke, whom the family had always called Pug on account of her flat nose and bony calves. It was Pug who rushed Imelda to the doctor while Mumma continued to try (unsuccessfully) to bring up the contents of the child’s otherwise empty stomach by ramming her nicotine-stained fingers down Imelda’s throat.
What with all the speeding and ramming and screaming, by the time they got little Imelda on the examining table she was too hysterical to thread the stomach pump hose down her throat. Hence the straitjacket. Imelda couldn’t recall the event, but Pug had told her the story often enough that the memory had created itself in her imagination, and since then she had occasionally watched it, movie-like, in her mind’s eye, which was what she was doing as she approached her car.
Imelda slid into the driver’s seat and grunted with the effort of closing the heavy door, then grabbed the family-size bag of Cheez Doodles she’d just bought and shoved it between her stomach and the steering wheel. After undoing the top button on her blouse, she poured out half of her Dunkin’ Donuts sweet tea, topped it up with the vodka she kept in the glove compartment, and gave the go-cup a festive swirl before taking a long pull through the straw. “Now that’s tea worth drinking,” she said to herself as she slipped the cup into the plastic holder that was wedged into the window channel of the driver’s-side door.
In 1970, when her butter-yellow convertible DeVille came off the assembly line, it featured an eight-track tape deck, stereophonic sound, white leather seats, power everything, and enough horses to launch a moon shot, but no place to put a drink, which was, in Imelda’s opinion, the car’s only flaw. She’d taken the Caddie off Edwin Brass after his third DUI, trading him a set of dragoon-size pepperbox revolvers and a bird’s-eye maple breakfront of questionable provenance. She missed haggling in her little antiques shop but lacked the stamina to keep it open anymore.
If there was one thing Imelda had always enjoyed, it was the freedom that came with dropping the top on her Caddie and sipping a cocktail while taking a drive on an Indian summer day like this, one that almost made her believe the beautiful lie about how the cruel winter might never come. Might never turn the red and yellow leaves the color of dried blood, then pull them from the trees, leaving them black and slick as they decomposed, like rotting corpses littering the ground below.
Imelda pushed the thought of winter from her mind. What was the point? With the drink safely stowed, she tore open the cellophane and put her hand into the bag. She hadn’t had a cheese puff in years. The neon shards raked the roof of her mouth, leaving her palate throbbing and her teeth gummed with a ticky-tacky residue. It was gratifyingly unpleasant. After a couple of handfuls she’d had enough, so she scrunched the bag down and dropped it on the seat. She shook out a yellow pill from the new bottle, chased it with the tea, punched the cigarette lighter, and extracted a Newport menthol ultra light from one of the half-empty boxes on the dash.
Imelda rolled the smoke around in her mouth before pulling it down into her lungs; somehow the nicotine itch was scratched with the first puff, a small miracle. Tilting her head back, she exhaled, releasing the smoke into the open sky. While she waited for the warm wave of nothingness, she took another drag and closed her eyes.
That morning Imelda had been to see Doc Norden for a follow-up visit and prescription refill. Three months before, she’d gone in for a checkup, primarily to put a cork in her husband’s nagging but also because she was hoping to get something for the pain in her back and shoulders, figuring it was probably arthritis, at worst a slipped disk. The examination included blood work, which led to tests, which led to biopsies, which indicated surgery was needed to remove a malignant lump in her right breast. But up at the big hospital in Bangor they hadn’t cut out anything; instead, they’d had one look inside her chest and sewn her right back up. After suggesting her family “make arrangements,” they’d released Imelda with a prescription for Vicodin and the promise of an eventual morphine upgrade. Since then, however, no arrangements had been made, because no one in the Levine family seemed to know how to discuss the situation.
Imelda had at first been angry at the news, but the pills took the edge off, and lately she’d lapsed into a mellower state of regret. Mostly she was sorry she’d missed out on smoking for the past twenty years when, apparently, her health had been shot to shit for some little time. She also regretted not taking the opportunity for a fling with Ellis Titcomb when he came home to bury his father back in ’82. And she was disappointed that she would probably not see the dawn of the year 2000 in a few months, when she’d been looking forward to the sparkling new beginning it promised since she first learned to add and subtract and figured out that in 2000 she’d turn sixty-three. At the time, sixty-three seemed impossibly old; now it was just impossible. Imelda sighed and picked up her tea.
“You gonna add a hot-fudge sundae to that wonderful lunch or just keep drinking it?” The voice, soothing as tinfoil between the teeth, was unmistakable, and it snapped her out of her reverie.
“The hell’re you doing here, Pug?” Imelda asked her aunt, who’d slipped noiselessly into the passenger seat and was rolling her feet around on top of the empty vodka bottles.
“Same’s you, I expect. Sniffing around town, indulging in a touch of self-abuse.”
“You can’t abuse the dead,” Imelda said, and stubbed out her Newport.
“You’re not dead yet, are ya?”
“You tell me.” When Imelda cocked her head to one side, she felt the fluids around her brain shift. The drugs were starting to kick in, or maybe it was the vodka. “Far as I can tell, no. About halfway, I guess,” she said.
“Still half-alive, then. So where’re we off to this fine day?” Pug asked.
Imelda had no idea. She hadn’t planned that far ahead; these days, she was more of a short-term thinker.
* * *
Imelda headed north out of Fairleigh, watching the town, with its half-empty strip mall, tatty thrift shop, and herd of auto parts stores, disappear in her rearview. They were eight miles from Imelda’s home in Wellbridge when Pug asked again about their destination. “I don’t know, so don’t ask me,” Imelda snapped. “And if you’re going to ride along, would you kindly make yourself useful and hand me a cigarette?”
“Get it yourself. I’ve got better things to do than help you destroy what’s left of your health.”
“Ohferchrissakes,” Imelda muttered. She pulled into the AutoLube lot, slammed the car into park, and tapped out a cigarette from the pack on the seat. Pug stared off to the east, whistling tunelessly. While she waited for the lighter to pop out, Imelda shoved a tape into the eight-track and was rewarded with the live version of “Cracklin’ Rosie,” which she cranked up loud enough to startle a delivery-truck driver idling by the loading dock. She’d always had a soft spot for Neil Diamond. Pug hummed along.
Narrowly avoiding the truck’s bumper, Imelda swung the Caddie back toward the road. She pulled out in a leisurely fashion but was forced to accelerate by a fully loaded logging truck that was bearing down on her in an urgent duet of horn blasts and Jake brakes. Pug was impressively unconcerned; by now Imelda’s husband would have been covering his head with his arms and whimpering. Bucky had never understood the concept of accelerating out of danger. He was more inclined to slow down in a crisis, which in Imelda’s experience was usually less effective.
“Goddamned men think they own the road,” she said, and stomped on the gas. “And they say women drivers are the problem. Bull. Shit.” As the eighteen-wheeler receded from view, Imelda turned her attention away from her passenger and back to the road, swerving into her own lane just in time to avoid an oncoming motorcycle.
“Oopsie poopsie. Sorry, Pug.”
“Eyes on the road there, speed racer,” was
all her aunt had to say. They drove in silence as far as the Wellbridge line. The sun was directly overhead and the wind whipped the ends of the big scarf that was tied around Imelda’s up-do. It occurred to her that the only advantage of going straight to stage four was that she wouldn’t have to endure chemo and lose what little hair she had. It had always been thin; she’d worn a hairpiece for years.
“I’ll make a lovely corpse, you know,” she shouted at Pug. “At this rate I’ll be at least ten pounds thinner and I’ll still have my hair. When Elsie Toothaker died she was bald as an egg. That mortician had to pencil in her eyebrows and glue a wig on her head, remember? She looked like Priscilla Presley on ice.”
“Really, Imelda? That’s what’s on your mind?”
“Yes it is. That is the sum total of what is on my mind at this time, Pug. And thank you for asking.”
As they approached the Bridge Point Road, which led to the white farmhouse where she and Bucky lived, Imelda considered turning and even moved her foot over toward the brake, but at the thought of being shut up inside that house, with its low ceilings and too-small windows, she continued north instead. The eight-track clunked over to the next program, and Neil, scratching disconsolately on his guitar, slid into a rather overwrought rendition of “Holly Holy.” Imelda snapped the music off.
“Bucky’ll be wondering where you’ve got to. He’ll be worried,” Pug said.
“About what? That I’ve run off the road and killed myself?”
“He’s quite shook up by all this, you know,” her aunt said.
“Not as shook up as I am. And what about you, Pug? You seem to be taking it pretty well.”
“Tell the truth, I don’t get awful worked up about anything anymore. But it is sad, Imelda, a hard thing to bear. For everyone.”
“Seems to me I’m the only one bearing anything, hard or otherwise. Everybody else just goes about their business. ‘We’re so sorry, Imelda. If there’s anything we can do, dear, just let us know. Can I get you a pill, Imelda? Should you be driving? How about a nice cup of tea?’ Let me tell you something, Pug, when your life’s down to the dregs, the last goddamned thing you want is a goddamned cup of Earl goddamned Grey.”
Imelda pushed the accelerator farther down and the Caddie surged forward, kicking up a shower of dust and pebbles as it fishtailed onto the shoulder, then back to the blacktop. In a blink they passed through Wellbridge’s town center: a prefab building that housed the post office and town hall: the guano-splattered war monument, the Catholic and Congregational churches glaring at each other from opposite sides of the road, and Red Craven’s single-pump gas station and convenience mart. Past Red’s, the town became the outskirts, and the outskirts dwindled to country. With every mile the white frame houses came fewer and farther between, their paint getting progressively peelier, their yards more cluttered. On several properties, pulled up beside the family homestead was a run-down house trailer, probably occupied by the owner’s still unfledged offspring, living separate, but not apart, from their parents, pirating Daddy’s cable, sharing a cordless phone, and showing up at Mumma’s table most nights for supper and the Wheel.
“Poor Bucky…” Pug sighed.
“Poor Bucky! Are you for real?” Imelda sputtered. “Poor Bucky?”
Buckminster F. Levine. Even now, Imelda could still recall the exact moment she decided to marry him. It was their third date; Georgy Girl was playing at the Criterion Theatre. Up to then, they’d kissed only once, and she still hadn’t decided whether there’d be a fourth date, but as they walked down the center aisle to find a seat, Bucky put his hand—no, not his hand, it was just the tip ends of his three fingers, now that she thought of it—on the small of her back in a gentle but proprietary way, then pressed lightly to signal the turn into the row. He hadn’t crowded her or asked if she’d like to sit there; he’d been just confident enough to choose a seat without talking at all. It made her like him better.
Imelda saw the form her life would take by the end of the movie, when Lynn Redgrave did the only intelligent thing and married James Mason—even though he was a lot older and noticeably peculiar—so that she could keep that cute little baby and live in a nice house and not have to work and be lonely all the time.
In 1967, Imelda married Bucky in a civil ceremony in the front room of his house, where they’d lived ever since. She was a twenty-nine-year-old assistant at the antiques shop in town. He was thirty-eight and had by then been living in Wellbridge and working as a certified public accountant nearly five years. Three people attended: Pug, her husband, Alonzo, and Bucky’s widowed father, an aspiring inventor, simmering anarchist, and self-proclaimed “thought innovator” named Melvin Levine (né Levinsky), popularly known as Red Mel.
Imelda had been greatly relieved when, in the summer of 1968, the local planning board, whose members Mel addressed as “Your Imperial Majesties” during the final meeting he attended, rejected his application for a permit to knock down the barn and replace it with an aluminum tepee and peat-moss sweat lodge. The next day, Bucky’s father packed up his VW microbus and headed south, then west, eventually landing in New Mexico, where he found a more hospitable environment in a commune of like-minded enemies of the state.
“You know, Pug, marrying me was the best thing that ever happened to Bucky.”
Pug inspected her nails.
“It was,” Imelda insisted. “Got him out from under his father’s thumb.”
“And right in under yours.”
“Malarkey. Since he retired, he stays shut up in that damned attic all day and night.”
“Still building boats in bottles, is he?” Pug asked.
“Friggin’ with his riggin’,” Imelda muttered. “You know, Pug, I think inhaling all that model glue has affected his mind. Lord’s sake, he’s only seventy, but he’s already an old man.”
Pug said, “Maybe he’s feeling blue because of your condition, Imelda. Ever think of that?”
Imelda snorted. Bucky was colorless, beige at best. Over the past twelve years, since their daughter left for college, it seemed to Imelda her husband had been gradually disappearing, as if one day he’d slipped inside one of his ship models. Well, she supposed, as she took a sip from her tea, he had his bottles, and she had hers.
“When’s Deborah coming?” Pug asked.
“I don’t know. You’d have to ask Bucky. He’s making her arrangements. Like always.”
“He’s been a good father, Imelda. You’ve got to give him that.”
Imelda couldn’t disagree. In fact, she thought, he’d been nearly perfect—as good a parent as she’d been a failure. When Deborah was little, he’d come home in the evening and feed her and read her to sleep. Most nights he brought his papers and worked at the kitchen table after she went to bed. When Deb got older, he’d help with her homework and take her skating in the winter. They had a bond; she and Imelda never did.
“She does care for you, Imelda,” Pug said.
“She tolerates me. When she can be bothered to come home.” Imelda’s foot had come up from the accelerator as she mused, and the Caddie was drifting along well below the speed limit. She stepped back down.
How had she come to resent her husband and daughter? And when had it become all right to admit it? She supposed it must have started after she gave birth. Postpartum depression, they called it now. Bucky’d had to take care of Deborah almost single-handed those first few months. Pug helped of course, and once Imelda was back on her feet things were pretty good for a couple of years.
It didn’t last. The closer father and daughter became, the more they shut her out. Imelda remembered one Sunday, she and Bucky had been fighting for days. Probably it was about money, but it might have been sex or politics, anything that came to mind, really. He had become withdrawn, shambling around the house and mumbling his answers to her questions. Eventually he stopped talking to Imelda at all, even when she made a point of provoking him. But that January morning, with the sky outside so low and snow-he
avy it seemed to be sitting right on top of their house and crushing it into the ground, he stood up from the breakfast table, straightened his spine, crossed the living room, and flopped down on the rug with Deborah, who couldn’t have been more than three. He spent the whole day with her books and games. Imelda hated to play.
Just that once, Imelda was fooled. Fooled into thinking the darkness would always pass, that the three of them were one family. That night, with Deborah asleep, Imelda waited for Bucky to come upstairs; instead, he sat in his chair, staring out at the snow until it was time to go to work the next morning. That was when she understood how it was and how it would be. Bucky and Deb reserved their happiness for each other and their misery for her, shutting her out, punishing her, she believed, for being who she was. Eventually Imelda spent most of her time in the little shop she’d opened in the barn, distracting herself with her customers and her curiosities, turning her back on her family, rejecting their rejection, disliking them for disliking her.
“You had a right to feel the way you did, Imelda,” Pug murmured.
Imelda was about to ask how the hell Pug knew what she was thinking when they came to the Bernville fork: right to stay on the coast road, left to turn inland. She banked left. Pug regarded her from under raised eyebrows.
“You won’t find any answers there. He’s sick, emphysema. Got one lung and a hole in his throat, with no wife to look after him,” her aunt said.
“Good,” Imelda said.
She’d heard about her father’s condition the week before from her baby sister, Jessie. Six months after Imelda’s mother died, their father remarried for the first time, ultimately adding a passel of half- and stepsiblings to the five he already had in a series of short marriages and haphazard relationships.
Imelda had been thinking about her mother a lot lately, wondering if she’d see her on the other side, or if there even was another side. She’d never been much for church and Bucky was an avowed atheist, but the idea that all death offered was slow rot in a pine box under the freezing ground seemed to suck the air from her lungs, made her feel like she was suffocating, even in broad daylight, under the September sun.
The Northern Reach Page 14