The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  “Okay,” the security guard said. “Why don’t you tell me what you want me to do. Really, what is it that you think I should do here?”

  Lemke stared into his face.

  “I think he wants you to shoot me,” Mother said.

  “Mother, will you please stop it. Please.”

  “Her own daughter can’t control her,” Lemke said to the guard. Then he turned to Carla: “You shouldn’t take her out of the house.”

  “I’m pregnant,” Carla said abruptly, and began to cry. The tears came streaming down her cheeks. It was a lie; she had said it simply to cut through everything.

  Her mother took a step back. “Oh, sugar.”

  Carla went on talking, only now she was telling the truth: “I’ve lost the last four. Do you understand, sir? I’ve miscarried four times and I need someone with me. Surely even you can understand that.”

  Something changed in Lemke’s face. His whole body seemed to falter, as though he had been supporting some invisible weight and had now let down under it. “Hey,” he stammered. “Listen.”

  “Why don’t you all make friends,” said the security guard. “No harm done, really. Right?”

  “Right,” Mother said. “My daughter had a—a tiff with her husband this morning, and he said some things. Maybe I overreacted. I overreacted. I’m really sorry, sir.”

  Lemke was staring at Carla.

  “I don’t know my own strength sometimes,” Mother was saying. “I’m always putting my foot in it.”

  “A misunderstanding,” the security guard said.

  Lemke rubbed the side of his face, looking at Carla, who was wiping her eyes with the back of one hand.

  “Am I needed here anymore?” the security guard said. Lemke said, “I guess not.”

  “There,” said Mother. “Now, could anything have worked out better?”

  “I have to tell you,” Lemke said to Carla, and it seemed to her that his voice shook. “We lost our first last month. My wife was seven months pregnant. She’s had a hard time of it since.”

  “We’re sorry that happened to you,” Mother said.

  “Mother,” said Carla, sniffling, “please.”

  “I hope things work out for you,” Lemke said to her.

  “Do you have other children?” Carla asked.

  He nodded. “A girl.”

  “Us, too.”

  “How old?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Seven,” Lemke said. “Pretty age.”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re all lovely ages,” Mother said.

  “Thank you for understanding,” Carla said to him.

  “No,” he said. “It’s—I’m sorry for everything.” Then he moved off. In a few seconds, he was lost in the crowd.

  “I guess he didn’t want his music after all,” Mother said. Then: “Poor man. Isn’t it amazing that you’d find out in an argument that you have something like that in common?”

  “What’re the chances,” Carla said, almost to herself. Then she turned to Mother. “Do you think I could’ve sensed it somehow, or heard it in his voice?”

  Mother smiled out of one side of her mouth. “I think it’s a coincidence.”

  “I don’t know,” Carla said. “I feel like I knew.”

  “That’s how I think I felt about you being pregnant. I had this feeling.” “I’m not pregnant,” Carla told her. Mother frowned.

  “I couldn’t stand the arguing anymore and I just said it.”

  “Oh, my.”

  “Poor Daryl,” Carla said after a pause. “Up against me all by himself.”

  “Stop that,” said Mother.

  “Up against us.”

  “I won’t listen to you being contrite.”

  Carla went back into the store, and when Mother started to follow, she stopped. “I’ll buy yours for you. Let me get in line.”

  “I can’t believe I actually hit that boy.” Mother held out one hand, palm down, examining it. “Look at me, I’m shaking all over. I’m trembling all over. I’ve never done anything like that in my life, not ever. Not even close. I’ve never even yelled at anyone in public, have I? I mean, think of it. Me, in a public brawl. This morning must’ve set me up or something. Set the tone, you know. Got me primed. I’d never have expected this of me, would you?”

  “I don’t think anyone expected it,” Carla said.

  They watched the woman with the twin babies come back by them.

  “I feel sorry for him now,” Mother said. “I almost wish I hadn’t hit him. If I’d known, I could’ve tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, like the officer said.”

  Carla said nothing. She had stopped crying. “Everybody has their own troubles, I guess.”

  She went to the counter, where people moved back to let her buy the tapes. It took only a moment to pay for them.

  Mother stood in the entrance of the store looking pale and frightened.

  “Come on, Sugar Ray,” Carla said to her.

  “You’re mad at me,” Mother said, and seemed about to cry herself.

  “I’m not mad,” Carla said.

  “I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine what got into me—can’t imagine. But, sugar, I hear him talk to you that way. It hurts to hear him say those things to you and I know I shouldn’t interfere—”

  “It’s fine,” Carla told her. “Really. I understand.”

  Outside, they waited in the lee of the building for the rain to let up. The air had grown much cooler; there was a breeze blowing out of the north. The line of trees on the other side of the parking lot moved, and showed lighter green.

  “My God,” Carla said. “Isn’t it—doesn’t it say something about me that I would use the one gravest sadness in Daryl’s life with me, the one thing he’s always been most sorry about—that I would use that to get through an altercation at the fucking mall?”

  “Stop it,” Mother said. “Don’t use that language.”

  “Well, really. And I didn’t even have to think about it. I was crying, and I saw the look on his face, and I just said it. It came out so naturally. And imagine, me lying that I’m pregnant again. Imagine Daryl’s reaction to that.”

  “You’re human. What do you want from yourself?”

  Carla seemed not to have heard this. “I wish I was pregnant,” she said. “I feel awful, and I really wish I was.”

  “That wouldn’t change anything, would it?”

  “It would change how I feel right now.”

  “I meant with Daryl.”

  Carla looked at her. “No. You’re right,” she said. “That wouldn’t change anything with Daryl. Not these days.”

  “Now, sugar,” Mother said, touching her nose with the handkerchief.

  But then Carla stepped out of the protection of the building and walked away through the rain.

  “Hey,” Mother said. “Wait for me.”

  The younger woman turned. “I’m going to bring the car up. Stay there.”

  “Well, let a person know what you’re going to do.”

  “Wait there,” Carla said over her shoulder.

  The rain was lessening now. She got into the car and sat thinking about her mother in the moment of striking the man with her purse. She saw the man’s startled face in her mind’s eye, and to her surprise she laughed, once, harshly, like a sob. Then she was crying again, thinking of her husband, who would not come home today until he had to. Across the lot her mother waited, a blur of colors, a shape in the raining distance. Mother put the handkerchief to her face again, and seemed to totter. Then she stood straight.

  Carla started the car and backed out of the space, aware that the other woman could see her now. She tried to master herself, wanting to put the best face on, wanting not to hurt any more feelings and to find some way for everyone to get along, to bear the disappointments and the irritations. As she pulled toward the small waiting figure under the wide stone canopy, she caught herself thinking, with a sense of depletion—as though it were a prospect s
he would never have enough energy for, no matter how hard or long she strove to gain it—of what was constantly required, what must be repeated and done and given and listened to and allowed, in all the kinds of love there are.

  Her mother stepped to the curb and opened the door. “What were you doing?” she said, struggling into the front seat. “I thought you were getting ready to leave me here.”

  “No,” Carla said. “Never that.” Her voice went away.

  Her mother shuffled on the seat, getting settled, then pulled the door shut. The rain was picking up again, though it wasn’t wind-driven now.

  “Can’t say I’d blame you if you left me behind,” Mother said. “After all, I’m clearly a thug.”

  They were silent for a time, sitting in the idling car with the rain pouring down. And then they began to laugh. It was low, almost tentative, as if they were both uneasy about letting go entirely. The traffic paused and moved by them, and shoppers hurried past.

  “I can’t believe I did such an awful thing,” Mother said.

  “I won’t listen to you being contrite,” Carla said, and smiled.

  “Touché, sugar. You have scored your point.”

  “I wasn’t trying to score points,” Carla told her. “I was only setting the boundaries for today.” Then she put the car in gear and headed them through the rain, toward home.

  HIGH-HEELED SHOE

  Dornberg, out for a walk in the fields behind his house one morning, found a black high-heeled shoe near the path leading down to the neighboring pond. The shoe had scuffed places on its shiny surface and caked mud adhering to it, but he could tell from the feel of the soft leather that it was well made, the kind a woman who has money might wear. He held it in his hand and observed that his sense of equilibrium shifted; he caught himself thinking of misfortune, failure, scandal.

  The field around him was peaceful, rife with the fragrances of spring. The morning sun was warm, the air dry, the sky blue. Intermittently, drowsily, the cawing of crows sounded somewhere in the distance, above the languid murmur of little breezes in the trees bordering the far side of the pond. A beautiful, innocent morning, and here he stood, holding the shoe close to his chest in the defensive, wary posture of the guilty—the attitude of someone caught with the goods—nervously scraping the dried mud from the shoe’s scalloped sides.

  The mud turned to dust and made a small red cloud about his head, and when the wind blew, the glitter of dust swept over him. He used his shirttail to wipe his face, then walked a few paces, automatically looking for the shoe’s mate. He thought he saw something in the tall grass at the edge of the pond, but when he got to it, stepping in mud and catching himself on thorns to make his way, he found the dark, broken curve of a beer bottle. The owner of the pond had moved last fall to Alaska, and there were signs posted all over about the penalties for trespassing, but no one paid any attention to them. Casual littering went on. It was distressing. Dornberg bent down and picked up the shard of glass. Then he put his hand inside the shoe and stretched the leather, holding it up in the brightness.

  He felt weirdly dislodged from himself.

  Beyond the pond and its row of trees, four new houses were being built. Often the construction crews, made up mostly of young men, came to the pond to eat their box lunches and, sometimes, to fish. On several occasions they had remained at the site long after the sun went down; the lights in the most nearly finished house burned; other cars pulled in, little rumbling sports cars and shiny sedans, motorcycles, even a taxi now and again. There were parties that went on into the early morning hours. Dornberg had heard music, voices, the laughter of women, all of which depressed him, as though this jazzy, uncomplicated gaiety—the kind that had no cost and generated no guilt—had chosen these others over him. The first time he heard it, he was standing at the side of his house, near midnight, having decided to haul the day’s garbage out before going to bed (how his life had lately turned upon fugitive urges to cleanse and purge and make order!). The music stopped him in the middle of his vaguely palliative task, and he listened, wondering, thinking his senses were deceiving him: a party out in the dark, as if the sound of it were drifting down out of the stars.

  Some nights when sleep wouldn’t come, he had stared out his window at the faint shadows of the unfinished houses and, finding the one house with all its windows lighted, had quietly made his way downstairs to the back door and stood in the chilly open frame, listening for the music, those pretty female voices—the tumult of the reckless, happy young.

  Today, a Saturday, he carried what he had found back to his own recently finished house (some of the men on the construction crew were in fact familiar to him, being subcontractors who worked all the new houses in the area). The piece of glass he dropped in the trash can by the garage door, and the shoe he brought into the house with him, stopping in the little coat porch to take off his muddy boots.

  His wife, Mae, was up and working in the kitchen, still wearing her nightgown, robe, and slippers. Without the use of dyes or rinses, and at nearly forty-seven years of age, her hair retained that rich straw color of some blondes, with a bloom of light brown in it. She’d carelessly brushed it up over her ears and tied it in an absurd ponytail which stood out of the exact middle of the back of her head. She was scouring the counter with a soapy dishcloth. Behind her, water ran in the sink. She hadn’t seen him, and as he had done often enough lately, he took the opportunity to watch her.

  This furtive attention, this form of secret vigilance, had arisen out of the need to be as certain as possible about predicting her moods, to be ready for any variations or inconsistencies of habit—teaching himself to anticipate changes. For the better part of a year, everything in his life with her had been shaded with this compunction, and while the reasons for it were over (he had ended it only this week), he still felt the need to be ever more observant, ever more protective of what he had so recently allowed to come under the pall of doubt and uncertainty.

  So he watched her for a time.

  It seemed to him that in passages like this—work in the house or in the yard, or even in her job at the computer store—her face gleamed with a particular domestic heat. Curiously, the sense of purpose, the intention to accomplish practical tasks, made her skin take on a translucent quality, as though these matters required a separate form of exertion, subjecting the sweat glands to different stimuli.

  She saw him now and stepped away from the counter, which shined.

  “Look at this.” He held up the shoe.

  She stared.

  “I found it out by the pond.” Somehow, one had to try to remember the kind of thing one would have done before everything changed; one had to try to keep the old habits and propensities intact.

  “Whose is it?” she asked him.

  “Someone in a hurry,” he said, turning the shoe in his hand.

  “Well, I certainly don’t want it.”

  “No,” he said. “Just thought it was odd.”

  “Somebody threw it away, right?”

  “You wonder where it’s been.”

  “What do these girls do to be able to drive those fancy foreign jobs, anyway?”

  “The daughters of our landed neighbors.”

  “Playing around with the workforce.”

  “Maybe it’s encouraged,” he said.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  The question made him want to get outside in the open again. “Sure. Why?”

  “It’s odd,” she said. “A high-heeled shoe. You look a bit flustered.”

  “Well, honey, I thought a shoe, lying out in the back—I thought it was odd. That’s why I brought it in.”

  “Whatever you say.” She had started back to work on the kitchen.

  Again, he watched her for a moment.

  “What,” she said. “You’re not imagining something awful, are you? I’ll bet you looked around for a body, didn’t you.”

  “Don’t be absurd,” he said.

  “Well, I th
ought of it. I’ve become as morbid as you are, I guess.”

  “I’ll get busy on the yard,” he said.

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  He tried for teasing exasperation: “Mae.”

  She shrugged. “Just asking.”

  Was it going to be impossible, now that everything was over, now that he had decided against further risk, to keep from making these tiny slips of tone and stance? At times he had wondered if he were not looking for a way to confess: Darling, I’ve wronged you. For the past nine months I’ve been carrying on with someone at work—lunch hours, afternoon appointments, that trip to Boston (she met me there), those restless weekend days when I went out to a matinee (the motels in town have satellite movies which are still playing in the theaters). Oh, my darling, I have lavished such care on the problem of keeping it all from you that it has become necessary to tell you about it, out of the sheer pressure of our old intimacy.

  Outside, he put the shoe in the trash, then retrieved it and set it on the wooden sill inside the garage. He would throw it away when it was not charged with the sense of recent possession, a kind of muted strife: he could not shake the feeling that the wearer of the shoe had not parted with it easily. He felt eerily proprietary toward it, as though any minute a woman might walk down the street in the disarming, faintly comical limp of a person bereft of one shoe, and ask him if he had its mate. He conjured the face: bruised perhaps, smeared and drawn, someone in the middle of the complications of passion, needing to account for everything.

  They had been married more than twenty-five years, and the children—two of them—were gone: Cecily was married and living in New York, and Todd was in his first year of college out in Arizona. Cecily had finished a degree in accounting, and was putting her husband through business school at Columbia. They were planners, as Dornberg’s wife put it. When the schooling was over, they would travel, and when the travel was done, they’d think about having children. Everything would follow their carefully worked-out plan. She did not mean it as a criticism, particularly; it was just an observation.

  “I have the hardest time imagining them making love,” she’d said once.