Homebodies

by Joan Schweighardt

  He is eyeing her now almost defiantly, as if he expects her to laugh at his stuttering or maybe at the nature of his new job. She can’t think of a response that won’t sound condescending any more than she can imagine him standing at a machine all day catching goo. It doesn’t seem like the type of job that would suit him. She still has this crazy feeling that they are being observed, that someone will admonish him if he doesn’t get back to his carts. She can feel herself breaking into a sweat. She looks at her wrist and realizes that she left her watch behind, on the counter with the grocery list. “I’ve got to run,” she says. “Maybe I can drive back later and tell you more about my sister. Would that be okay?”

  He looks away from her, off toward the supermarket entrance. Then he shrugs with one shoulder. “O-kay.”

  He tells her he works until four. Mrs. Bowker will be at the house until five. They make arrangements to meet in the parking lot.

  Mrs. Bowker opens the door before Liz even reaches it. It makes her feel uneasy, as if Mrs. Bowker has been watching for her from a window. “Shhh,” the old woman says, bringing her finger to her lips. “The little one is sleeping. Just went down for her nap. She ate most of her lunch today but wouldn’t touch her carrots. You know, you left your grocery list behind. I ran out with it, but you were already pulling out of the driveway. You seemed to be in an awful hurry this morning.”

  Her face is a knot of concern, but Liz knows that her expression is nothing more than an endeavor to conceal her curiosity. She could have killed Pete when she learned that he’d brought the children to Mrs. Bowker’s some three months ago. Mrs. Bowker had just been too eager. And then when Liz went over to pay her—for Pete, who seemed agitated that day, had somehow forgotten—the old woman insisted that the pleasure she had derived from sitting with the children would only be diminished if she were to accept compensation for it. When Liz opened her pillow shop, she found a college girl to sit with the kids on Mondays when she did her errands. That worked out just fine—except that the girl, Nancy, had to take off one Monday to study for midterms. And Liz, not wanting to disturb the routine she had set in motion, called Mrs. Bowker, against her better judgment, to come in for just that one occasion. About a week later, Pete found a draft of a lascivious letter that Nancy had written to her boyfriend asking him to come to the Arroways so that they might engage in amorous pursuits while Brigit was napping. It had been typed on Pete’s typewriter and left, uncrumpled, in his wastebasket. Of course they had to fire the girl. Liz would have looked for another, but then Mrs. Bowker, who’d heard about Nancy’s impropriety from Jake, showed up on the doorstep, begging to take Nancy’s place, professing to adore the kids and claiming now to be destitute. What could Liz say?

  “I’ve got to hurry with these groceries,” Liz says. “I’ve got an appointment. I don’t want to be late.” She sees her watch on the counter and slips it into the pocket of her jeans.

  “You bring in the bags and put them on the kitchen table,” Mrs. Bowker says. “Then I’ll unload them and you can put them away.”

  Mrs. Bowker is overbearing, but today Liz has too many things on her mind to give her dictatorial attitude much consideration. She takes care of the groceries as quickly as she can and answers Mrs. Bowker’s questions with as few words as possible. Did Jake’s report card come yet? Has he pulled up his math grade at all? Now that the school year is nearly over, have they given any thought to taking a vacation? They really should consider it. It would do them a world of good. And she’d be glad to watch the house, to come in and water the plants.

  Liz doesn’t have any plants! She feels like saying to her, “Get a life, would you, Mrs. Bowker?” That’s what Jake always says to her. As she moves toward the door, Mrs. Bowker holds her hand up aside her face. “What kind of appointment, dear? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  Liz stifles her urge to sigh. “I’m having my hair cut.” Mrs. Bowker looks horrified. “Just a trim,” Liz calls out as she heads for the door.

  Out of the salon by three and left with an hour to kill, she goes in and out of the stores at the strip mall, sweeping her fingertips over various items but looking at nothing other than her watch. She thinks about Sherri, about how she went wild when she called her to let her know what she’d said to Eduardo. Sherri wouldn’t stop screaming long enough to hear her out. After Sherri hung up, Liz got Jake and Pete to call her back and tell her that she came down on Eduardo out of love for her, to keep her from getting into trouble. Pete said she didn’t have any response, but Jake was more honest. “She says you don’t know the first thing about love,” he told her. “She says all these years she always thought that you were the smart one, but now she knows you’re not. She says you’ve got bad blood, not her, that everybody gets that wrong. She says you’ve gone thirty-nine years without having any feelings inside you and you’re trying to kill her like you’re trying to kill Poppie. She says you kill people with your cold heart and your bad blood.”

  What a thing to say! Liz couldn’t imagine how she could justify such a declaration, even in her mixed-up mind. She shrugged it off at first, simply because it was too preposterous to even consider. But it keeps coming back to her anyway.

  It seems rather absurd to sit in the Jeep in the middle of the parking lot and she is tempted to ask George to take a short drive, but she can’t bring herself to do so. It’s not so much that she still thinks there is something surreptitious about him as it is that she feels a sense of guilt, though she can’t imagine why. After all, she has come to talk to him about her sister, not about herself.

  She takes the keys out of the ignition and slips them into her bag. “Do you drive, George?” she asks.

  He looks at her sharply, and then away. She can see she’s insulted him again. “Well of course you drive,” she blurts out. “What I meant to ask is whether or not you own a car.” He stares out the window. She wants so badly to have him like her, and yet she feels she alienates him every time she opens her mouth. She takes a deep breath. “What kind of a car do you drive?” she asks firmly.

  He takes a deep breath too, and she can’t tell whether he’s nervous or angry. A moment passes. Then all at once he begins to talk to her, to really open up. He tells her that his car is not one but three. The body is that of an old Chevy that he picked up at a junk yard. The engine came from another junker, and miscellaneous parts from still another one. He put them all together himself. He rebuilt the engine for almost nothing.

  He speaks slowly, deliberately, stuttering occasionally, but less than when she talked to him earlier. He uses pronouns where nouns are appropriate, so that his discourse is hard to follow. She doesn’t want to keep asking him what “it” refers to, so she has to really concentrate, to piece his discourse together as he did his car. It is obvious that he is very proud of his car, of his resourcefulness, and she is touched by his pride. She tries to imagine Pete putting a car together from junkers. Pete could write a book about building cars, but he couldn’t actually do it.

  They are silent for a while. It makes Liz giddy to find herself sitting so close to a stranger about whom she knows next to nothing. But then she has been sleeping with a stranger for years. She finds she has an urge to tell George things about herself, all the secret things that have been reeling inside her of late. Somehow she thinks he’d understand—not the words, maybe, but the pain—or rather the painlessness, the numbness. She can’t feel her life. It is only a movie without an end.

  Liz looks at her watch. The ride home will take her a half hour, and it’s already 4:30. Mrs. Bowker has to leave at five sharp today. She has a visitor coming for dinner. And Pete seldom gets in before 5:30. “Let me tell you something about Sherri, my sister,” she begins.

  She can hear the anxiety in her voice. He must hear it too, for his eyes come sweeping up to meet hers briefly. Then they move away to scrutinize the sky or perhaps some dirt on her windshield. He hardly seems to breathe. “Sherri has a few problems,” she says determinedly. “Psycho
logical problems.” She attempts a laugh. “I guess we all do.”

  He glances at her, defiantly, she thinks. “I just thought I should tell you that before you decide whether or not you’d like to meet her. She’s vulnerable. She’s sensitive. Sometimes people take advantage of her.”

  He smiles. “See th-that little bird there,” he says.

  She glances where he is looking and sees a sparrow perched on the top of the dumpsters. “Sometimes she gets herself in trouble. Recently, she … well, she seems to fall in with these scheming types, if you know what I mean. The man she was seeing most recently has no scruples at all, makes his living gambling. He kidnapped someone once. I knew he’d get her into trouble, so I broke it up. She’s been very angry with me ever since. I see you all the time when I shop. There’s something about you.” She can’t tell if he’s even listening. “George, I wish you’d help me out here. This is all very awkward.

  “Maybe she’s not your type,” she says. “Maybe this was all a bad idea.”

  She feels herself on the verge of tears, but as usual, they don’t come. She looks at her watch again. She’ll never make it back in time. Jake is certainly capable of watching Brigit and Katie for a half an hour, but Mrs. Bowker will undoubtedly be reluctant to leave the three alone together. And she’ll want to know what happened, why Liz was so late.

  “You cl-close?” he asks, still staring off toward the dumpsters.

  Liz looks at him. “Sherri and me?”

  “Yeah. I mean, like, h-hanging out? Wh-when you was t-teenagers and af-after?”

  Liz is puzzled. “Hanging out? Not really. By the time Sherri was old enough for us to hang-out, I was gone. I moved out of the house right after high school. I left the state, didn’t really stay in touch for some years.”

  “L-lonely,” he says.

  “Yes, I suppose she was lonely.”

  “N-no. Y-you. Y-you are.”

  She feels as if she’s just been slapped, hard, across the face. The movie rewinds. She sees her parents yelling at Sherri, worrying about Sherri, consoling Sherri, the three of them a closed unit. You go through your whole life aware of some wound within, and then some stranger comes along and names it for you.

  “I’ll m-meet her,” he whispers as he slips out of the passenger seat.

  Liz gets back at 5:20. Just as she suspected, Mrs. Bowker hasn’t left. Now she is frantic, wringing her age-spotted hands, complaining that she’ll never have enough time to get dinner ready for her guest. She wants to know why Liz was so late. Liz notices that there is a bulge in the pocket of the old woman’s housecoat and wonders what it is. She mumbles something about meeting a friend. Mrs. Bowker waits to hear more, but Liz reminds her of her guest and leads her to the door.

  Jake is up doing his homework. Katie and Isabel are watching TV in the living room. Brigit is in her walker, bouncing about, trying to get hold of Simon’s tail. Pete is barely in the door when Liz begins to bombard him with facts about her meeting with George. She insists that he call Sherri right away to see whether she will come up this weekend to meet him if she promises to stay out of her sight.

  Pete is concerned. “What do you know about this man?” he asks. “He helps you with the groceries. Big deal! How do you know he’ll like Sherri? What if he doesn’t? I think you should stay out of her affairs. Look what happened the last time you got involved.”

  Liz stands with her back to the wall and watches while he darts about the kitchen, getting things ready for dinner.

  “I don’t know, Liz. I can see this means a lot to you. I can’t remember the last time I saw you so animated. Maybe you’re right. Maybe this would fix things up between you and Sherri. But I like these things to happen by themselves. Still, with Sherri … Maybe you’re right. If she got involved with someone up here, we’d see more of her. I hate to think of her down there all by herself, watching TV night after night, walking the malls every day, making pancakes for dinner, eating ice cream out of the carton for dessert, leaving the carton on the sofa so that the residue leaks out, dreaming about José—”

  “Eduardo,” Liz says.

  Pete turns with the frying pan in his hand and stares at her quizzically. He looks like the old Pete now, the one whose mind you can see at work. She smiles; she has never been so light-headed in her life. “Eduardo, Pete, for God’s sake,” she reiterates. “You know as much as God about everything else, but you can never remember anyone’s name!”

  “Eduardo, of course,” he says, shaking his head and pushing up his glasses to rub his fingers on the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me lately. I must be working too hard. I think my brain is turning to mush.” He cocks his head and looks toward the ceiling. “I can see it leaking out, my brain, like Sherri’s ice cream.” He shakes it off. “Eduardo, of course. How could I have forgotten Eduardo.”

  He puts down the frying pan and moves toward the phone.

  JAKE

  Jake is expecting a call from a girl from school, so when the phone rings, he figures it’s her, runs into his parents’ bedroom, and picks it up. Liz picks it up downstairs at the same time. Before either of them can say hello, a frantic voice on the other end screams “IS PETE THERE?” It is so loud that Jake almost drops the phone. Then he realizes it’s only his aunt.

  The penalty for eavesdropping in the Arroway house is a minimum of five days no phone, no TV. Jake can’t afford five days no phone now that he’s in love with Jane. But his aunt has been angry with his mother, and he can’t very well hang up when there’s a chance that he might get to hear her curse his mom out. Besides, he can’t imagine what his aunt wants to talk to his father about; it’s only been an hour or so since she left them.

  Pete picked Sherri up late in the morning and brought her back to the house. When he saw them pulling into the driveway, Jake warned his mother and she ran upstairs just like she promised. He listened for her all afternoon, hoping she would make some noise, cough, or drop something, and get his aunt started. But she didn’t make a sound. Her book was still in the living room, so she couldn’t have been reading, and she never sleeps in the daytime. Jake doesn’t know what she did all day. Later, he had to bring her dinner up on a tray. Then this weird guy came over to get his aunt for a date.

  He went upstairs to tell Liz that the weird guy had arrived and found her filing her fingernails, her tray still half-full on the night table. He should have known then that something was going to happen, because Liz always finishes her dinner and she never files her nails. Usually she cuts them so short that they don’t need filing. When he told her the guy was there, she started brushing her hair like she thought she was the one who had a date. She asked if Pete was making the guy feel at home, and Jake said he was talking to him. Then she went to the door like she wanted to go downstairs and check out the scene for herself. Jake warned her that she’d better not because Sherri was liable to throw a fit and then the guy might not want to take her out. But he was sorry he said it as soon as it was out of his mouth because if his aunt threw a fit and scared off the guy, then he and Sherri could play Poker all night and his mother would have to spend even more hours in her room. It would be a good punishment for her after what she did to him.

  He sat in the living room with his father, Sherri, and her date. The guy was stuttering, talking about, as far as Jake could determine, his car, which was what Liz told Pete he should ask him about. He was wearing a George Carlin t-shirt, fumbling with the bottom of it like he was really nervous. Pete was nodding and trying to make himself look interested. Sherri was just staring at nothing with her bottom lip sucking in the top one and her eyebrows high and arched. She was sitting on the edge of the chair with her purse dangling from her wrist as if she was in a hurry to leave and get it over with. Jake could tell she didn’t like the guy. He wasn’t anything like Eduardo. His eyes were jumping all over the place like he thought someone was going to pop out and try to scare him or something.

  Jake looked up and saw Liz sta
nding halfway down the stairs, just at the point where the wall ends. Her eyes were wide and her head was tilted to one side. Jake nodded, to make her think it was okay to come down now, but she just stood there listening, with her hand on the railing. Then he tried to get his aunt’s attention, but he couldn’t do that either. He was going to point to her sweatshirt and see if he could get her to laugh. Her sweatshirt was dirty from the gravy she spilled on it at dinner. Pete offered to give her one of Liz’s, but she said, “No way. I ain’t wearing nothing of Lizzie’s. Lizzie’s got bad blood. It might rub off on me.” Then Pete offered to give her one of his. She said, “That’s okay,” and she smiled with her lips pressed together and nodded her head fast like she does when she doesn’t want the conversation to go any further.

  Jake’s aunt doesn’t care about wearing dirty clothes. She doesn’t even care about dirt on her face. During dinner, she had a piece of asparagus stuck on the side of her mouth. Jake kept looking at it. They all did. Finally Katie told her she had asparagus on her face and Sherri laughed like it was the funniest thing she ever heard. She probably would have left it there too, but when she started laughing, it fell off by itself.

  Liz says, “I can hear you, Sher. You don’t have to yell, for God’s sake.” But Sherri only yells again. “IS PETE THERE?” Jake hears his mother call his father to the phone. He gets on and asks Sherri what the problem is. Sherri answers him so loud that Jake has to hold the phone an arm’s length away from his ear, but even then her words are all jumbled and he can’t understand her. She is trying to say everything at once. He hears the words “hotel” and “underwear” and “smokes,” but that’s it.

  He guesses his father doesn’t get much more because he says, “Okay, Sherri. I want you to stop talking and take three deep breaths. Do you hear me?” But she doesn’t. He has to say the same thing three times before she realizes that he is talking on top of her. Then she stops and Jake can hear her taking the three deep breaths just like he said. Then Pete says, “Okay, now, I want you to start all over again, nice and slow, and a little softer.” Jake can hear his mother in the background asking what happened. Pete shushes her, but she keeps it up anyway.