Beyond Deserving

by Sandra Scofield

  “You were fourteen. They weren’t your responsibility.”

  They eat in silence. Shyly, Katie says, “I can’t believe that I can talk to you about—I hadn’t thought of that boy in a hundred years. It was in a park, behind some bushes, and I’m sure he thought I was wild and experienced, and he was upset when he found out I wasn’t. He said he was sorry, and made me cry. I never talked to him again. Now, all these years later, I can see him. His short buzzed haircut and his nice big shoulders, and tight jeans. And I remember I wanted to tell my mother, too, I wanted to taunt her with it, but I knew it wouldn’t hurt her, it would hurt me. What was better was having it secret from her. Having her ask where was I going and what was I going to do, and having curfews, while all the time I knew I could do whatever I liked. God. It comes back.”

  “See? Memory’s not a hole your life falls into. It’s all there. You could get into it. We’ve got everything in this town. You could get into rebirthing, that far, or farther.”

  Katie finds that funny. “I don’t think there was a birth,” she says. “I don’t think my mother had me. I think she spit me out.”

  33

  Katie, dressed for dinner at Jeff’s, is standing with him in the driveway of Michael’s house. They arrived to find Michael buzzing the lawn with edge-clippers. Michael turned the machine off and is now amiably listening to them.

  “I don’t understand this arrangement of vehicles.” Jeff says. He insisted on going for Katie’s car. He has made arrangements for a friend to work on it in the morning.

  Katie’s car is in the front of the drive, by the garage. Behind it are both Ursula’s car and Michael’s pea-green pickup. “How are we going to get in there to give your car a jump?” he asks Katie.

  Katie says nothing. Michael drawls, “I don’t think a jump will do it.”

  “I told you, it’s not the battery,” Katie says. Her jaw aches from clenching her teeth. To please Jeff, who invited another couple, she is wearing a dress she bought a few weeks before, a mauve rayon print in a modified forties style, with a wide waist and buttons all the way down the front. She feels awkward in front of Michael, with Jeff, in a new dress.

  “What it would need is a push,” Michael says blandly.

  “A push!” Jeff explodes. “How the hell are we supposed to push a car that’s between the garage and another car!”

  “I don’t think Fish figured on giving it any more pushes. He’s going to repair the starter. The rest of us will be at work, and he can back right out.”

  “If you move your cars now we can push it backwards into the street,” Jeff says. Katie is mortified. She can’t imagine what Jeff is waiting on. Maybe he is starting to see how stupid he is being. Until today, Katie would have described Jeff as a calm and polite human being, not provoked by minor irritations, and predictably intelligent. A scientist. She seems to have brought out the worst in him.

  “Ursula!” Katie calls out brightly as Ursula comes down the front steps.

  Ursula looks rumpled and sleepy. Katie makes hasty introductions, which Ursula and Jeff barely acknowledge. “We’ve come for my car.”

  “Fish has gone round to Bi-Mart. He’ll be back any minute. Anybody want a beer?”

  Jeff marches over to Katie’s car and peers in. Katie says to Ursula, “Feels just like summer, huh?” She feels stupid.

  Michael is winding the cord neatly around the handle of the edge-cutter and tying it with a length of wire. “Beer sounds good,” he says, and takes the edger down the basement stairs.

  Fish pulls along the curb. He comes up the drive carrying a large brown paper bag of cans. “I thought since I couldn’t work on the starter today, I’d change the oil and plugs and filter,” he says to Katie. He pretends not to see Jeff.

  “We’d like to take the car,” Jeff says stiffly, coming closer. He glances at his watch.

  “That’d be a real dumbshit thing to do,” Fish says to Katie.

  “I’ve made arrangements.” Jeff is telling this to Katie, too.

  “This is ridiculous!” Ursula snaps. Her glare takes them all in. Ursula’s eyes narrow. It is unusual for her to be ill-tempered.

  “There’s plenty of help here. We just push the car into the street and get it started.” Jeff speaks as if they are all small children. “After the cars are moved.” He goes to his own car.

  Katie sees Fish go from angry to hurt to perplexed, and back through again. He clasps the cans to his chest. “What is this shit about?” he asks Katie.

  About MY business, Katie thinks angrily. About Jeff, whose business it is not, telling me what to do.

  He was so insistent, rational, and cool. She should not be depending on the man she has just decided to divorce. She should learn to manage her own affairs. (And who is managing them now?)

  “I’ve got to go,” she says.

  “I’ll push the fucking car down the drive,” Fish says. He throws the sack to the ground and the cans roll in the yard. “I’ll push it through the fucking YARD—”

  Ursula reaches out and grabs Fish by the shirt. “Hold on.”

  Katie turns and walks back to Jeff’s tidy little Nova. Standing in the street at the door, she smiles tensely at Fish. “Sorry,” she says. She doesn’t know if he can hear her, but he is looking her way and he must get the idea. He picks the cans back up and stomps off toward the car.

  Michael comes down the front steps with beer bottles. “Forget it,” Katie hears Ursula say.

  “Hey thanks!” Katie calls inanely. Michael and Ursula are attending to some other matter between them It is a relief to slip away.

  “What is going on?” Jeff demands as he slams his door. “This is the craziest damned divorce I ever saw.”

  She is looking past him at the Fishers in their yard. Carter has come around the back and taken a beer from his dad. Ursula begins to talk intensely, shaking her hands at Carter, who looks, as he usually does, like he is about to laugh. Juliette is hanging out of the second-story window, waving toward Jeff’s car. Her hair hangs loose, a Rapunzel’s cascade. A year ago she was a child.

  “I want to go!” Katie says.

  Jeff starts the car.

  “There are two ways to get through this evening,” Katie says. “Take me home or forget this scene.”

  “I have a rack of lamb in the oven and good friends coming to dinner.” He looks at her glumly. It seems almost funny to hear him say, “I like your dress.”

  A block or so later he says, “So that’s the famous Fish.”

  Katie ignores his contempt, though she feels defensive and angry. She says quietly, “He’s a plain person, like me.”

  Jeff’s friend Oatley is a specialist in grains at the experimental station. His wife, Jane, is pregnant, just starting to show. They are at least ten years younger than Katie. Jeff puts on music that Katie doesn’t like—something jazzy but quiet, muted, and dull. He and Oatley begin to discuss things she can’t follow, while she and Jane sip their Chablis and smile now and then. Jeff’s duplex is furnished comfortably. Katie sinks back into the big soft cushions of an armchair. Jeff says he has to see to the food, and Oatley follows him into the kitchen, talking about durum wheat.

  “Do you—” both women begin at once, and laugh. “You first,” Katie says. She has been thinking that Jane’s hair is expensively cut, in a precisely casual way that makes her look as though it isn’t necessary to spend any time at all on her looks. Such easy beauty has always awed Katie.

  “I was wondering if you have something to do with the station, too.”

  “I met Jeff at a party. I work in the costume shop at the theatre festival.” Katie is sure Jane knows everyone who works at the experimental station. Why doesn’t she just say, Who are you?

  “How wonderful! How fascinating.”

  Katie doesn’t know whether to ask what Jane does. She did not do anything at all while she was pregnant. Maybe Jane is waiting for Katie to say more about her job. People think anything that has to do with theatre is exc
iting. In its way, it is. She does humble work, but she is fast and dependable. She sees the designs go from paper through all their hands to the stage. It is the only interesting work she has ever done. To think she learned what she knows from her mother!

  Would Jane be interested in any of that?

  Or would she want to talk about herself?

  At the shop, Katie listens to the women talk about babies. Friends and sisters, one of the cutters, all expecting. They talk about whether the baby was planned or not, whether there will be a midwife or a doctor. They talk about prenatal yoga and bonding.

  Jane, apparently cued by Katie’s silence, says, “I do children’s books. I think of myself as an illustrator, but we’re so far from anywhere, I have to do the stories, too. I can’t pair up with anyone from here.”

  “That sounds like fun.”

  “It is, though I don’t do as well as I might, financially. I need to get to New York and make some contacts. Once people know me I can do a lot by phone and mail. I was thinking of spending some time there this winter, but now—” She pats her stomach.

  “New York will always be there,” Katie says. It is the last place she would want to be.

  The conversation, such as it was, dies. Katie offers to get them more wine but Jane pats herself again and declines. “I’m trying to do all the right things. After all, I’m married to a biologist.”

  Katie supposes that was a witty thing to say, and she smiles at Jane, but she is starving, and she wonders if Jeff will stay angry at her. She hopes their tiff has not made Fish angry too, so that her car will still be sitting there tomorrow. She hopes Jeff will be himself again, but not amorous. She wants to eat and go home to sleep. Alone. She feels she has walked straight into a conflict not worth having, and she wants to forget it. She doesn’t care if she ever sees Jeff again.

  She is happy to see the food the men bring in: lamb and crusty peaked potato puffs, and the orange cauliflower she has been hearing about. She utters praise. She answers their questions briefly, and by the time the plates are emptied, she realizes the three of them are having quite a good time without her. They are friends, and they go easily from topic to topic, to which she has nothing to add. Most of the time she doesn’t even know what they are talking about: old-growth forests, land-use planning, airline safety, a new museum site. She cannot stifle her yawns.

  She and Fish used to talk about things they had seen that day that were dumb, things that made them mad at the stupid way the world was run. They told one another the plots of books they were reading. They talked about Ursula and Michael and their kids, about what to make for dinner, and maybe about someplace to go next winter or next summer or next year. It didn’t really matter what they said. They occupied the same space. They were companions.

  The others begin speaking of the baby. Jane’s mother will come first for two weeks. Oatley’s will come next, and then he will take a few weeks’ leave. They will decorate the back bedroom in yellow and white. They will use a birthing room at the hospital. Katie floats. Surely they will not ask her opinion. In her own pregnancy she did not so much as read a magazine article. She assumed someone would tell her what to do at the hospital. She was glad she hadn’t fooled herself about who was in charge. She was glad she hadn’t had any idea how humiliating and painful it would all be.

  If they look at her she will say, How wonderful.

  The wonder is that Jeff is so intrigued. He is enjoying the talk of babies and breathing lessons. He hasn’t ever brought up those prospects for himself. Maybe only women speculate about babies. Maybe, for all his rambling revelations, he thinks she is too odd to talk about babies.

  Oatley and his wife are hardly out the door before Katie jumps on Jeff. “You could really get into that, couldn’t you?” He is an ordinary, hard-working, successful young man, with a strong ego, and every reason to want a normal life, a family life, which she has never assumed she would have. Which Fish has guaranteed she will not have.

  His eyes flash with aggravation. “We must have covered fifty subjects tonight,” he says.

  “Babies.”

  “They’re my friends. I’ll be the godfather.”

  “You’d like one, too, wouldn’t you? You’d like to be a father?” She is growing angry, with no time or inclination to wonder why.

  “Well of course I would!” He looks away. She takes a breath and calms down. She feels doltish. She feels, as she has for days now, that things are out of her hands. She did not mean to pick a quarrel. His very defensiveness is full of warning and hints of perspectives she has not considered. His private life. His future. For all his intimate discussions, he has never said anything that really matters.

  She collects her wits. “I only ever had one real lover and that was Fish. I never dated. I don’t have the experience to figure out where we are, you and I, Jeff. If I’m supposed to understand something, you have to tell me. It’s probably not a good time to bring it up.” She tries to think why he would be attracted to her. She must seem so uneducated and outdated, though he once claimed she was intriguing.

  “Christ, I asked you to go to Europe with me!”

  “And then?”

  He is exasperated. “I’ll pay for it. I want your company. I thought you would be thrilled, Katie!” At least, excited, he calls her her own childish name and not the alternative one he has imposed on her without asking.

  “I never said I wanted to go to Europe.”

  “Everybody wants to go to France.”

  “Everybody wants to have children, too. You should ask someone else. You don’t have me in mind for that.”

  “I’m not going to Europe to have a baby! Why are you trying to pick a fight? Christ, Katie, you are crazy.”

  “I want to leave.” He said crazy. And maybe he is right.

  34

  They drive to her place in silence. After Jeff drops her off without apology (what does he have to be sorry for? why did they quarrel?), she sits in the apartment in the dark, sipping her own cheap Chablis until the bottle is empty, and so is her mind. All she thinks is, What was I thinking?

  How did she ever forget that she is an outsider, and that only another outsider would ever understand?

  She changes into her scuffed Reeboks and walks down the hill and across the boulevard, over to the Fisher house.

  A single light shines in the front room, but she cannot see in the window. She imagines Michael reading. Or maybe Carter working on something.

  She sees no light through the tiny basement window. She walks down the steps and stands there dumbly, still not knowing what she is doing. Did she expect Fish to be sitting on the curb waiting for her?

  When she thinks back over all the years with him, all the anguish, the separations, the quarrels and silences, she remembers how there were perfect moments, too, when they understood that a bad time had passed, when they came together without explaining or dissecting what had happened before, just came together because it felt right and there were the two of them against the world, and there was nothing they needed to say.

  She leans toward the door and hears the low murmur of a radio. Fish’s truck is on the street. He has to be inside.

  She aches, though she does not know just where.

  The door opens and she jumps.

  “I heard you on the stairs.” Fish slips out of the basement and closes the door behind him. He is wearing jeans and no shirt or shoes. He puts his hands on her shoulders.

  “I’m sorry about this afternoon,” she whispers.

  They are so close on the stairs she can feel his body heat. He is tan and strong, his arms ropy, his hands rough from his work.

  She realizes there must be a reason he didn’t want her in the basement. She feels a flush of embarrassment. “I’ll go.”

  “No.” He moves a hand to her waist. He touches the top button of her dress with the other hand. “Pretty,” he says.

  She slides away and moves up the stairs to the yard, slowly, with effort.
/>   “Let’s sit in the van,” he suggests.

  She turns back to him. “Who’s inside?”

  “Never mind. She’s asleep. I was coming out for a smoke.”

  She follows him to the truck and slides in on his side, across to the other seat. The stars are out. People are supposed to be happy. Somewhere nearby someone plays a melancholy song on the saxophone, not well, too slowly.

  “What do you want me to do?” he asks. He takes a cigarette and match from the dashboard, lights the cigarette, and inhales deeply.

  “I want you to tell me about it.”

  “Jail?” She feels closest to him when he tells her things that happened to him when she was not with him, things he would not tell anyone else, things that will never be a story in his repertoire.

  “Yes.” She waits while he takes several more drags off his cigarette. He flips the butt into the street.

  “We planted trees.”

  “I know. But before that, in the prison. Did they hurt you?”

  “No. They hurt younger guys. Kids. Pretty boys.” He scoots closer to her. “Fresh meat.”

  She makes a sound in her throat. “But not you.”

  “I lay on my cot at night and listened to them scream.”

  “And nobody came.”

  “Nobody.”

  “But not at the camp.”

  “There wasn’t that. There were two men who had their way, but they wanted it and nobody cared.” He touches her top button again. He undoes it, and touches the base of her throat with two fingers.

  “And the Indian?”

  He takes his hand away and stares forward. “Indian?”

  “You wrote about an Indian.” How could he forget? It was his only card. (“He can do bird calls.”) “Did they send him back after he broke the rules?”

  “They put him to work in the kitchen.”

  “Oh.”

  Fish crawls past her and begins moving things off the bed. Her heart is pounding so hard she thinks he must hear it. The loose button of her dress seems to flap against her pulse. He shakes the shabby quilt and smooths it over the bed. She made the quilt from scraps in a cabin they rented one winter in British Columbia. She felt so clever, like a pioneer cat.