Homebodies

by Joan Schweighardt

  He knew that tomorrow he would regret all this. There was a girl in his English class who was much more his type. She was intelligent, argumentative, serious, beautiful in her own way. He had struck up a conversation with her day before last and was planning to ask her out. First he had thought to take her to a movie, but more recently he had decided to take her into the City, for an afternoon at the Metropolitan and then dinner, Spanish cuisine.

  Nevertheless, Pete and the braided woman rolled into each other’s arms. She told him in her little-girl whisper that she was genuinely sad. He told her that he was genuinely sad too. She asked him what he thought would happen if they merged their sorrows. He said he didn’t know, but that he thought it was worth a try—even though it would probably cost him his A on the test.

  They made slow, calm, hushed, grave, but immensely satisfying love.

  She was gone when he awoke in the morning, but she had left him a note—on one of the pages from his little notepad, which, apparently, she had taken from his pants pocket. He was not her type, it read, but she had very much enjoyed herself anyway. He had brought her comfort and she hoped she had brought him some of the same. She had copied down his name and his phone number from an automobile insurance registration form that she had found on his desk and would give him a call one of these days to see how he was getting along. She left him her name and number in case he wanted to talk to her before that.

  He didn’t call her. But when she called him nearly two years later to say that she had reconsidered and now suspected that he might be her type after all and would like to get to know him better, he agreed to meet with her. As it happened, he had just broken off his relationship with the girl from his English class. Her humorlessness, in the end, had gotten to him. He was one class away from graduation and had put a deposit down on an attic apartment in an old farm house in a nearby rural community. He had a part-time job at a local bank and had sold two short stories and an article about the changing times. He was ready for her. He had been thinking about her for nearly two years.

  LIZ

  Pete is just adjusting his tie when Liz awakens. His eyes dart toward her immediately. “You were really noisy there for awhile,” he exclaims, his head bobbing, his features reflecting concern. “First you laughed, then you gasped … and this forlorn look came over your face. I thought I should wake you, just in case you were having a nightmare. But then I got to thinking how much I hate to be interrupted from a vivid dream, even if it is a nightmare. Did you know that primitive people believe that when they dream, their spirits leave them? And that if they’re awakened abruptly, their spirits may not have sufficient time to return? I didn’t know what to do. What was happening?”

  Liz can only stare at him. His concern for her psyche is touching, but she can’t seem to concentrate on it and on the dream at the same time. She remembers that she was not human but some kind of animal, a bear, it seems now, and supposes that that is not so strange given the fact that her father had some kind of halluncination involving a bear. There had been a winter storm in the dream, and she had dug out a cave in the side of a snow bank for shelter. She remembers the absolute darkness, and then, God knows how much later, a diffused light filtering in through the snow at the end of the passage. And when she turned from it, she realized that she was not alone, that there were cubs there with her, her cubs, four of them. Three were cavorting, clawing at one another and growling playfully, the milk dripping from their mouths as rich as a cow’s. The fourth cub seemed to be asleep. She nudged it, but it didn’t stir. Then, because the light had begun to make her feel claustrophobic, she began to dig her way out.

  She claps her hand over her mouth. When it slides away, she mumbles, “I was in a cave. It was so vivid.” She forces herself to lift her head to look at him. “What day is this?”

  “Monday. They’ve had breakfast. Katie is dressed and downstairs watching Brigit. Jake’s in the process. A cave?”

  “What do you suppose it means?”

  Pete comes over and sits on the edge of the bed, his hand not far from her hip. Liz, who feels a deep desire for consolation, would like to take his hand, but such an affectionate gesture seems inappropriate in view of the turn their relationship has taken. She only touches him now at night, in the dark, when she can’t see his expression. “Well,” he begins, “Edgar Cayce would say that finding yourself in a cave indicates a desire to punish yourself.” He looks away from her. “But you haven’t done anything wrong, have you?” He stares for a moment at the foot of the bed and then looks up again. “And I never gave much credence to Cayce anyway. Stekel would say a cave is a dread of lunacy. Freud, I don’t remember. I’ll have to look it up. But you know how I feel personally. Symbols in dreams are personalized. What does a cave mean to you? Were you hiding? Resting? What were you doing exactly?”

  Pete’s fingers are short, but his knuckles are prominent. As if it makes him uneasy to see her staring at them, he curls them into a fist. “I was in a cave, with the kids,” she says, sighing. “We weren’t trapped. We got out. But …”

  “But what?”

  She looks up at him. “I don’t remember. It’s fading,” she lies.

  Still, she is hoping he will question her further. She doesn’t want him to leave her bedside, but he smiles, thinly, as if he’s just realized their conversation is an aberration and is now becoming uncomfortable with it. “If you get up right now,” he says, “I can wait with Brigit until you’ve showered. I have enough time.”

  Later, after Pete, Katie, and Jake have gone, Mrs. Bowker comes to stay with Brigit and Liz leaves to go to the supermarket, as she does every Monday. She is so concerned with her dream that she forgets her carefully prepared list at home and has to rely on memory. It’s a miracle that she manages to fill her cart. Yet, as horrible as the dream was, it’s almost a relief to have something to distract her from the hostility that she’s been experiencing lately.

  Not that anyone besides Sherri has actually stopped talking to her. Jake didn’t speak to her during the first few days of his punishment, but eventually he came around, asking her questions concerning the whereabouts of his clean underwear and what kind of snacks were in the house. But he still doesn’t talk to her about his classmates or the things that happen at school like he once did. When she inquires, he says that there’s nothing new, nothing she’d be interested in. Sometimes he reminds her that baseball season began during the two weeks he was grounded, that missing the first three practices caused him to be cut from the team. But there isn’t as much venom in his tone as there was initially; he no longer tells her that she’s ruined his life. In turn, she no longer tells him that he nearly cost his grandfather his. Scheming to take him to the Bronx Zoo, of all things!

  The funny thing is that it is usually Pete who doles out the punishments, but this time he left it entirely in her hands. She thinks Jake’s scheme must have appealed to his imagination, because really Pete had very little to say about the event at all. “Why don’t you help me out here?” she said to him. “You’re always talking about how you don’t want to be a passive man?” He looked at her and said nothing.

  When he’s silent, she imagines he’s thinking about Gladys. She has no idea how far their relationship has progressed in all this time, some three months now. When she calls him at his office, he’s usually there. Or, when he isn’t, Judy tells her he’s with a client and due back any time. Once when Pete was out, she dared to ask Judy whether Gladys was in, and before she could think of a way to inform her that she was only curious, Gladys was on the line. Liz told her she’d called to thank her for the beautiful dinner—although it was already three weeks behind them by then—and got off the phone as quickly as possible.

  If he doesn’t see her during the day, then she doesn’t know when he does. He comes home every evening as always. Sometimes Liz is afraid that they haven’t had a chance to spend much time together at all yet. If that’s the case, then it’s all ahead of her. If it weren’t for
the change in him, she might, by now, have begun to believe that she’d only imagined what she saw beneath the table when she bent down to pick up a slice of bread. Or that it was only a flirtation that ended shortly after it began.

  Sometimes she spends whole days rehearsing the words she will use to confront him. But then the kids come home from school, Pete comes home from work, and they all sit down to dinner. Lately, Pete’s taken an interest in game shows. It puzzled her at first, because he always professed to despise television. But now she suspects that he watches the shows because Jake does, to form some kind of bond with him. So heartened is she by his resolve that she decides their confrontation can wait another day.

  Strangely enough, their sex life has improved since this thing with Gladys began. Or maybe it’s not so strange. She wants Pete more now that she knows he’s not entirely hers. She finds herself reaching out to him during the night, wanting to cling to him in the darkness, desiring that moment of release that annihilates all the others. Sometimes she imagines that she can smell another woman on him, and, for reasons about which she doesn’t care to speculate, that seems to make her want him all the more. And then of course she wants him because he’s not the Pete she married. He’s a new man, a stranger, and despite the fact that she despises him much of the time, she hasn’t yet recovered from the novelty of finding herself in bed with someone about whom she knows nothing.

  He seems to want her as well. He wants them both, she supposes. But it’s costing him something. He picks at his food and has lost weight. Frequently, he looks tired and sad. There are times when she thinks that maybe, subconsciously, she enjoys his misery, that she doesn’t confront him because she wants to see it linger. Other times she feels like a person who knows she is gravely ill but doesn’t want to go to the doctor for fear of having to act. She is buying time, buying an illusion of their former life, and hoping in the meantime that the whole thing will blow over, that one day she’ll awaken and find that the illness has perished on its own.

  And if it doesn’t, well, at least she’s got an income now; she’s taken care of the practical aspect. She turned the porch into a pillow shop. She found some heavy fabric in the basement and made curtains from it for all of the windows. She insulated the ceiling and re-paneled. Mrs. Bowker gave her a space heater. The entire transformation cost her much less time and money than she would have expected. She should be able to work out there even in the winter now, sewing pillows, stuffing them with down, offering others the very thing that is no longer available to her—a good night’s sleep. She’s had lots of customers, lots of custom orders. People want the craziest things to put under their heads at night.

  Standing on the check-out line with the cart whose contents she couldn’t name on a bet, she thinks about the dream again. She doesn’t need a dream interpretation book to know that the dead cub was Maddy. She hasn’t seen her in a long time now. Her withdrawal has been more painful for Liz than the withdrawal of all the others put together. But now in the dream … In the dream Liz walked away from her. She left her in the cave to perish while she and the other cubs went out to dig for bilberries. They feasted, smearing their paws and muzzles with juice. Then climbed hills and rolled down them, making hair-covered paths in the snow. And all the while, the other cub lay in the cave, alone, abandoned.

  If she were a psychologist, she supposes she’d say to herself, Liz, don’t you see that you were ready to leave her? That that’s what the dream was all about? You made a decision and you worked through it, subconsciously, in the dream. But Liz never made that decision, subconsciously or otherwise. She couldn’t have. The dream was all wrong.

  It’s all so tiring, all these things to think about. It seems to be all she does anymore. Her life is like a movie that she is being forced to watch, her mind a train that keeps coming. She is waiting for it to end so that she can cross the tracks into a place where serenity is a possibility. She wishes she could find a cave. She would go right in, close off the passage, lie down in the dark, and try to sleep.

  In the process of putting her grocery bags into the back of her Jeep she senses someone very close behind her. She freezes for an instant, but when she turns around, she sees that it is only George, one of the men who collects the carts and bags the groceries. He’s helped her before. Once, when she had an inordinate number of bags, she tried to give him a tip. But he lowered his head as if she’d embarrassed him and said he wasn’t allowed to accept it. She has never addressed him by name before, but today she feels an excessive desire for intimacy. “Hi, George,” she says. He glances at her suspiciously, probably because he didn’t know she knew his name. She backs away from the truck to encourage him to finish unloading her cart.

  The supermarket employs several baggers and cart-collectors who appear to be troubled, emotionally disturbed, or mildly retarded. Most of the others, however, have a look about them, a way of walking or of holding their heads that gives them away—like Sherri. George is something of an exception. For one thing, he’s incredibly handsome. His bones are prominent and his skin has a weathered look. He has longish, black hair and a grey mustache. But the grey must be premature because his face is youthful. Liz imagines he’s in his mid thirties—like Sherri. His eyes are an intense blue. He’s tall, muscular, graceful. He moves slowly and purposefully. He’s quiet. She’s seen him standing among the chatty check-out girls with his mind locked on his own thoughts, or maybe on nothing at all. The other employees have to call out his name over and over to get his attention. He’s very serious; she doesn’t recall ever having seen him smile or laugh. That, and the way he has of never looking at anyone directly, are the only things that give him away.

  A wounded man … wounded like Sherri … Sometimes Liz thinks Maddy’s withdrawal is somehow related to what she did to Sherri, that maybe she’d come back if Liz found a way to undo it. Maybe that’s what the dream was trying to tell her. “Thank you,” she says to George when he’s finished loading. But she’s reluctant to let him go. She has an idea. George closes the hatch gently and tries it once to make sure it locked. He removes the keys, hands them to her, and turns toward the empty cart. She grabs it before he does. His hand retreats in haste. “Can I ask you a question?” she blurts out.

  He cocks his head, waiting, his eyes on the keys in her hand.

  She laughs nervously. “Are you married, George?”

  He lifts his eyebrows but not his gaze. She wishes he would look at her. “No,” he says, almost crossly.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  She can see the ‘Why?’ verging on his lips, but he doesn’t say it. “Do you ever go on … on blind dates?”

  “Blind dates?”

  “Yes, you know. When two people who don’t know each other make arrangements to go out for an evening.”

  Instead of answering, he puckers his lips. She feels like an imbecile. She doesn’t know what she is doing, speaking of blind dates to a stranger. “I have a sister about your age. She’s very sweet, but …” But what? She can’t very well say, But sick. “… but a little on the heavy side.”

  He squints. Then his eyes fall from the keys in her hand to his feet. “I don’t l-like a g-girl for her looks,” he says irritably.

  She is shocked to realize he stutters and embarrassed for having insulted him. She touches his arm by way of apology. He flinches and pulls it away. “I didn’t mean to imply …” She laughs nervously. “I don’t know you! I don’t know anything about you!”

  He glances at her. “Then w-why do you want to fix me up with your sis-ter?”

  She gets lost for an instant in the intensity of his eyes and can’t remember herself. But when his gaze returns to his feet, she does. Still, she can’t very well say to him, Because you are, I assume, disoriented, on the periphery of society, and she is too, because she thinks I’ve ruined her life and she hates me now, because at first her anger didn’t bother me but now it does, because I had a dream last night and I’m no
t myself today, haven’t been myself for so long that I don’t know who I am.

  George is still waiting for a response. His eyes come up, but not as far as hers. He doesn’t blink, just stares at her shoulder, at the place where her shoulder-bag strap cuts into it. He doesn’t seem to think it strange that she should be standing before him with her mouth opened, unable to speak.

  It occurs to her that people who live on the edge see through people like herself. She feels superficial, manipulative, and exposed. When she phoned Eduardo the first time, Pete said, “Aren’t you being just a little manipulative?” “Not manipulative. Protective,” she answered. “I just want to introduce myself, let him know that Sherri has a sister who looks out for her.” But Eduardo wasn’t in that night. And the next night, the police found her father in an alley, and then she had a lot more to say to Eduardo than she would have ever thought. She could have pressed charges. At least she didn’t do that. “Look, George,” she says. “It’s all a little complicated.”

  One corner of his mouth pulls back. “Tr-try me.”

  She realizes that someone may be watching them, one of the supermarket’s managers, maybe. What if George loses his job because of her? And what is she doing anyway? There is something turbulent about George. She imagines he is capable of violence. “I shouldn’t be taking up your time like this,” she stammers. “Your boss might not like it.”

  He shrugs. “Pea-nut but-butter. St-starting next week.” He looks up at her face, into her eyes for the first time, and snorts a laugh, probably at her quizzical expression. “A p-peanut bu-butter factory,” he explains. “The n-nuts get m-mixed up with o-other stuff and get g-g-ground, and when the goo comes out like ice-cream, I’ll be th-there to ca-ca-catch it in a j-jar. Someone else p-puts the lid on. Someone else p-puts it in a box.”