“What,” he said.
“We’d never inspire that kind of gratitude in anyone.”
“I’m too old to start trying,” he said.
She shrugged. “Anyway, you haven’t answered my question.”
“Which question is that?”
“Whether or not you and Mom are still in love.”
He looked at her. “It’s an aggressive, impolite, prying question, and the answer to it is none of your business.”
“Then I guess you’ve answered it.”
“Goodness gracious,” he said with what he hoped was an ironic smile. “I don’t think so.”
Somewhere beyond the roof of the porch, birds were calling and answering one another, and over the hill someone’s lawn mower sent up its incessant drone of combustion. The air smelled of grass, and of the paint he’d been using. A jet rumbled across the rim of the sky, and for a time everything else was mute. As the roar passed, his granddaughter’s voice came faintly to him from the yard, talking in admonitory tones to an imaginary friend.
“That kid’s imagination,” Susan said. “Something else.”
They were quiet. William noticed that the bottom edge of the sun had dipped below the burnished haze at the horizon.
“I thought you said she’d be here any minute.”
“She just went to get some carry-out,” William said. “But you know how she can be.”
“We really don’t talk about you, Dad.”
“Okay,” he said.
“We talk about my divorce, and about men who don’t pay their child support, and we talk about how I’m sort of sick of living alone all the damn time—you know?” She seemed about to cry. It came to him that he was in no state of mind for listening to these troubles, and he was ashamed of himself for the thought.
He said, “She’ll be home soon.”
His daughter looked away from him. “You know the tiling about Mom?”
“What,” he said, aware that he had faltered.
“She knows how to blot out negative thoughts.”
“Yes,” he said.
“She thinks about other people more than she thinks about herself.” He did not believe this required a response.
“You and I,” his daughter said, turning toward him, “we’re selfish types.”
He nodded, keeping his own eyes averted.
“We’re greedy.”
In the yard, Elaine sang brightly about dreams—a song she had learned from one of her cartoon movies, as she called them.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Mom ran off and left us,” Susan said. “At least I wouldn’t blame her.”
“Well,” William said.
They waited a while longer, and Elaine wandered over to sit on her mother’s lap. “Mommy, I’m thirsty. I want to go inside.”
“What if she did leave us?” Susan said. He turned to her.
“I wonder what we’d do,” she said.
“I guess we’d deserve it.” He reached over and touched Elaine’s hair.
“No, really,” she said. “Think about it. Think about the way we depend on her.”
“I’ve never said I could take a step without her,” said William.
“There you are.”
“She doesn’t mind your confiding in her, Susan. She doesn’t mind anyone’s confidence. Christ, that girl across the street—” He halted.
“Well,” she said, holding up the package. “She gets the pretty scarf and earrings for her efforts.”
“That’s true,” he said. For an instant, he thought he could feel the weight of what he and this young woman, his only child, had separately revealed to Cat; it was almost palpable in the air between them.
The light was fading fast.
“Granddaddy?” Elaine had reached up and taken hold of his chin.
“What?”
“I said I want to go inside.”
Susan said, “We heard you, Elaine.”
“I want to go in now.”
“Be quiet.”
“We can go in, sweetie,” William said.
“I’m getting worried,” said Susan.
He stood. “Let’s go in the house. She’ll pull in any minute with fifty dollars’ worth of food.” But he was beginning to be a little concerned, too.
Inside, Susan turned on a lamp in the living room, and the windows, which had shown the gray light of dusk, were abruptly dark, as if she had called the night into being with a gesture. They sat on the couch and watched Elaine play with one of the many dolls Cat kept for her here.
“You don’t suppose she had car trouble,” Susan said.
“Wouldn’t she call?”
“Maybe she can’t get to a phone.”
“She was just going to China Garden.”
“Did she say anything else? Is there anything else she needed?”
He considered a moment. “I can’t recall anything.”
In fact, her departure had been a result of his hauling out the ladder and paint cans. He had thought to follow her advice and get himself busy, moving in the fog of his strange apathy, and when he had climbed up the ladder, she came out on the porch. “Good God, Bill,” she said.
“I’m putting myself to work,” he told her.
“I don’t feel like cooking,” she said, almost angrily.
“No,” he said. “Right.”
She stared at him.
“It’s a few cracks. This won’t take long.”
“I’m getting very tired, William.”
“This won’t take long.”
“Don’t fall.”
He said, “No.”
“If I go out to get us something to eat, will you eat?”
“I’ll eat something.”
“Is this going to be to enjoy, or merely to survive?”
“Cat.”
“I’ll go to China Garden okay?”
“You sure you feel like Chinese?”
“Just do me a favor and don’t fall,” she said.
And he had watched, from his shaky height, as she drove away.
Now he turned to his daughter, who sat leaning forward on the sofa as though she were about to rise. “Is that the car?”
They moved to the front door and looked out. The driveway was dark.
“Maybe we should call the police and see if there’s been any accidents,” Susan said.
“It’s only been a little over an hour,” said William. “Maybe it’s taking longer to prepare the food.”
She stopped. “Let’s go there.”
“Susan.”
“No, really. It’s only ten minutes away. We’ll see her there and then we can relax.”
“Let’s wait a few more minutes.”
She moved past him and into the living room, where Elaine sat staring at her own reflection in the blank television screen.
“It’s time to put the dolls away,” Susan said to her.
“I’m still playing with them.”
“Is there something,” William began. “Do you want to talk?”
“I came to visit. There wasn’t anything.”
“Well,” William said, “you had all that difficulty on the phone.”
“Fun and games,” she said.
He was quiet.
“Why don’t you put the ladder away,” she said. “And the paint. If she pulls up and sees it’s still there, it might scare her.” “Why would it scare her?”
“Oh, come on, Daddy. You haven’t been much like yourself the last few weeks, right?”
He turned from her and went out onto the porch. It was full dark now, and the crickets and night bugs had started their racket. Perhaps Cat had found it necessary to confide in her daughter about him. If that were so, his place in the house was lonely indeed.
He was ashamed; his mind hurt.
The moon was half shrouded in a fold of cumulus, and beyond the open place in the cloud, a single star sparkled. He took the ladder down, set it along the base of the house, then closed the paint can
and put the brush in its jar of turpentine. Twice he saw Susan at the door, looking out for her mother. And when Cat finally drove in, Susan rushed out to her, letting the screen door slam. The car lights beamed onto the corners of the house, and he felt the burst of energy from Susan’s relief, the flurry and confusion of his wife’s return. Cat emerged from the car and held up two packages. He was at the dim end of the yard as she came up the walk.
“What’re you doing?” she asked. “Come eat.”
How he admired her! “Putting things away,” he said. He had meant it to sound cheerful.
“I hope you’re hungry.”
He was not hungry. Cat and Susan went up the steps of the porch and into the house, Susan leading the way, talking about the absurd county caseworkers and their failures, their casual attitude about laws broken, restraining orders left unheeded. He walked around to the garage and put the paint can and the glass jar on a shelf. The night was cool and fragrant. From inside the house, he heard Elaine shout a word and his wife’s high-pitched laughter.
Now they were calling him from the porch. They were all three standing in the light there.
“I’m here,” he said. “I was putting the paint in the garage.”
“You’d better be hungry, old man,” Cat said from the top step, in her way of commanding him, and out of the long habit of her affection. “I’ve got a lot of good food here.”
“A feast,” Susan said.
“Tell me you’re hungry,” said Cat.
“I’m famished,” he said, taking the step toward them. Trying again, gathering himself.
BILLBOARD
I’d been thinking about burning my once goddamn intended Betty’s house down for about a week. Playing with the idea and looking at it in my head. This wave of thinking it through, like a push under the chest bone, like I’d really do it. There’d be the sweet revenge of it. After what they did to me. My own brother and my fiancée. One day things are normal as they have been for six years and then bang, Eddie and Betty are absent. Poof. Gone. The two of them.
Well, I let the rage seep down into me through the days. Kept getting this dream: I’m on a big billboard with a cigarette in my fingers, and it says “Alive with pleasure.” Big letters six feet tall. My face ten times bigger than that. Handsome as all hell. In the dream, I go by this thing on my way to Betty’s, on my way to exacting some payback from her and little brother. I’m flying, doubled up on this motor scooter, a tiny mother that squeaks like an un-oiled wagon. I’m headed over there, knowing the whole thing and living absa-fucking-lutely in the middle of it. I’m flying along on the scooter and there the thing is, up in front of me, bigger than life. This damn billboard with me on it looking like absolute Hollywood.
I’m roiling around in broken glass under my skin, right? But it’s like Betty’s waiting for me anyway, and not in New York fucking my brother. I’m going to bring her over to the billboard and park and wait for her to look up. Hey Betty, look who’s alive with pleasure. Only, in the dream I can’t find her house. It’s gone. Everything’s where it was, trees and bushes and all that, but no house. Nothing. Empty ground. A burn place. Gone, just like Betty. Girl I loved. My own brother. I’m driving all over the county, and then I know again that she’s gone off with him and I’ve burned the house down and for the rest of that dream I’m looking hard for both of them even knowing I’m asleep—like it might be fun to kill them both in there where it doesn’t matter.
And I start wondering if it means something I’m on a fucking scooter, so I start asking questions in a general way about it. Without explaining the whole thing. I find myself telling it to Susanna at work. Worked in the stereo department at the Walgreen’s together. Turns out, I’m given a strong opinion from Susanna, who I’ve known since high school. A vague irritation through all the years. Susanna. “Everything means something,” she says importantly.
We’ve been doing a lot of this kind of talking, and I don’t think it means anything. Other than I’ve got murder in my heart.
“How did you find out?” Susanna asks me.
Took my poor mother telling me. Woman hated confrontations, and here she was wringing her hands, with her hair up in that beehive she always wore. Giving me the bad news. Sixty-three then and still slim, with that way of trying to soften the blow about the whole experience of life on this planet, if you know what I mean. Like she figured all along from the day I was born that I was going to get the shit knocked out of me. I felt that way.
“Larry,” she says, “you got something else you want to do tonight?”
Like that.
“What’re you getting at?” I say, though I guess some part of me knows this isn’t going to be pleasant. There’s too much pain in her face.
“Betty’s gone with Eddie. They headed north, son. Getting married.”
“Eddie?” I say. “Betty?”
She nods like it’s news they’re dead.
Well, I figured they might as well be. I could see the two of them strolling all over New York together. Honeymooners. Betty wearing clothes I bought her, since I had the job. Betty listening to tapes I made for her.
I don’t know how I could’ve let Susanna in on all this, but I did. Fact is, she was always there, like the walls of a damn room or something. Around, you know. This aggravating somebody you don’t have to be careful with.
“You know what I think your dream means?” she says. “I think it means maybe you got a big head.”
And I say, “Jesus Christ, Susanna.”
And she says, “Well, there it is. It’s only your head in the picture, right?”
“I don’t know why I tell you anything,” I say. We’re being fairly good-natured under the circumstances.
“Well, it is your head, right? Big as a house?”
“It’s my face.”
“Well, your face is on your head.”
“It’s a picture. Like the one out on Interstate Twenty-nine.”
“That’s Jeff Bridges, id’n it?”
“This is a dream,” I say.
“No, the real one. Id’n that Jeff Bridges?”
I figure Susanna’s trying to work me a little, the way she does. When she’s like that, talking to her can be like trying to give complicated instructions to a foreigner.
“I know what it means,” she says. “You’re not as big as you wish you were. That’s why you’re on the scooter.”
“No,” I say. “I owned a scooter last year.”
“You never rode it,” she says.
“Doesn’t matter whether I rode it or not,” I say.
Susanna’s tall. Smart. Back then, she was very skinny and not much at all up top, which she suffered for all through high school. She carried herself in a sort of hunched way, like something was bothering her in her heart. Looking at her, you got the feeling that if she melted she’d go on a long, long time. A river of Susanna. Everywhere I went at work, there she was. I’d known her, ten years? twelve years? An aggravation, generally, but we both hated Grimes, who owned the store. Compared to Grimes, she was all sweetness and light.
Anyway, she says, “I don’t think your dream means anything.”
And I tell her, “You said before that you thought everything means something.”
“Only if you want it to,” she says.
“Bullshit,” I say.
“The fact that you say bullshit could mean something,” she says.
And I say, “A repeated dream means something.”
And she says, “You’re mad at Eddie.”
“Raging,” I tell her.
“He fell in love,” she says. “Poor guy.”
“He snuck around behind my back.”
“I think it’s like in the movies,” she says. “Romantic, like it should have music playing behind it. And they’ll have Betty’s nice house to live in, if you don’t go off the deep end.”
“Shut up, Susanna.”
“Do you love her?”
“She was engaged to me,�
� I say. “Of course I love her.”
“Did you tell her that? I mean, obviously you didn’t provide something she needed.”
“Yeah, I just trusted her and gave her anything she wanted.”
This goes on all day in the store. Nobody comes in. Mr. Grimes is going to go bust. “Put up a billboard,” I tell him. “You have to advertise.”
“I heard that,” Susanna says. “You’re dreaming again.”
In the stockroom there’s some boxes to break up, so I break them up. I wreck them. Boom. Boom, with a hammer from the hardware section. Splitting Eddie’s skull. Splitting Betty’s. Boom, little brother. Boom, Betty-bye. In my head I’m watching her house go up like any movie fire I ever saw. I’m her, come home with my new husband to find everything destroyed.
“I heard you back there,” Susanna says.
“I wasn’t striving for quiet.”
And she says, “Tell me more about your dream.”
There’s nothing else to tell. So I say that.
“You never find her house, right?”
“Right,” I say.
And she says, “Want to go somewhere tonight?”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Maybe it’ll help,” she says. “Get your mind off things.”
No. And I wish Betty was home so I could take Susanna over there. Have Betty see me pull up with long Susanna in the car. Another girl. But Betty’s house is empty. Because Betty’s in New York giving it to my goddamn little brother.
And the next thing I do is walk over to the hardware section for a gas can. My blood’s going a mile a minute.
“You’re asking for trouble,” Susanna says, behind me.
“Look,” I say. “Go find somebody else to bother.”
“I’m the voice of your conscience,” she says.
“Fuck off,” I say.
“Okay.” She sings it. “I’m the voice of your future. I’m the voice of consequences—time in jail, trials and fines and Betty’s policeman brother. Boo.”
“I’m going to cut my lawn,” I say.
But then when it’s closing time she’s all primed to come with me. So I tell her no. “I usually cut the grass alone,” I tell her. “I’m weird that way.”
She says, “I know what you’re thinking of doing, Larry. You said you dreamed it was all burned. And it’s just like you. It’s got television written all over it.”
The Stories of Richard Bausch Page 57