Homebodies

by Joan Schweighardt

  She hasn’t lifted her fork yet. Her hands are still folded neatly on her lap. She guesses she appears composed enough, but inside, she is more than that; she is granite. Her stomach has long ceased fluttering. All systems are down. She doesn’t have the energy to register a reaction, let alone a complaint—if that’s what he’s searching for. “Actually, you haven’t spent any,” she whispers.

  Pete, who hasn’t heard her, says, “Listen to me. I ask you to lunch and then I go on and on about work, about my crucial decision for the week—whether or not I should stay overnight for an ad convention. Let’s talk about something else. Tell me, how’s Sherri doing? You must feel so much better now that you’ve opened things up with her … no pun intended. Did you speak to her today?” Before she can answer he shakes his head. “That George,” he declares. “He had me fooled. He seemed like such a decent guy. And now—disappearing like that. A peanut-butter factory! He must have been plotting, scheming from the first.”

  “Yes,” she agrees. “It’s very hard to tell with some people.”

  Friday evening, when Pete is packing his things, Liz sits down on the edge of the bed and asks the question she already knows the answer to. “So,” she says as casually as possible, “you never told me. Did Gladys decide to go or not?”

  He stops what he is doing to look at her. “Yes. She decided to go.”

  It is almost a lament. He continues to stare at Liz, his head bobbing off toward his chest as if he is falling asleep. Then all at once he drops the shirts he is carrying onto the bed and throws his arms around her. With him leaning over her like that, their embrace is awkward. He releases her and turns away, but not before she notices the moisture rising up in his eyes. He goes back to his packing with his head lowered.

  Liz finds she has an urge to stand up and embrace him properly. She nearly laughs to think she can be so foolish. But if she is a fool, then he is a child; his confusion is that transparent. She feels the way she does when she knows that Jake or Katie are up to some mischief which is troubling them even as they are setting about it. While she is struggling with her inertia, however, he opens his underwear drawer and pulls out two pairs of shorts, one almost new and the other old and frayed. He looks them over. Then, glancing at Liz, he puts the new pair back into the drawer and tosses the old pair into his suitcase.

  Liz’s moment of pity passes. She gets up from the bed and hurries out of the room, certain that when she inspects the drawer later, she will find that the old shorts are back in the drawer, stuffed beneath the others, and the new ones are gone.

  “So, do you really think you’ll get to visit my father?” she asks in the morning as she walks him to the door.

  He turns to look at her, his expression confused. “Oh, right, right. Well, I’m going to try. You know it’s not that close.”

  “It’s in the same town, for God’s sake, Pete. In all this time you haven’t been to visit him once.”

  “You know how I feel about that. If I thought for one minute that I could bring him any comfort at all—”

  “But how do you know that you can’t if you haven’t tried? And besides, what else have you got to do after dinner?”

  “Right, right. I see your point. I’ll try. I’ll make an effort.”

  His departure is unceremonious. He kisses her cheek, tells her again that he’ll try to get over to the nursing home, and leaves.

  It has rained almost all week, and Liz is hoping for one more day of the same so that she won’t have any customers. She suspects she won’t have many anyway. Generally, she closes her shop on Saturdays so that she can visit her father. But today she doesn’t feel up to the long drive. She wants to set this day aside as a day of brooding. She is planning on scouring the toilet and the kitchen floor, listening to the kids fight, being miserable. She doesn’t expect an eruption, but she wouldn’t mind a tremor or two—enough to stop the film, to mark her as something other than a disinterested spectator. But the day opposes her right from the start. It is warm and bright out with birds singing in the trees as if there’s a competition going on. And her first customers, a couple from the city who have a vacation home in the area, appear at the door before she can even finish her second cup of herbal tea. They have their own fabric with them and some sketches they made of the various pillow shapes they want cut from it. Their order comes to over $400. Liz can’t help but be pleased.

  Just after they leave, Katie and Jake come in, and as if they conspired with the weather against her, they offer to take Brigit out for a long walk to keep her out of Liz’s hair until it is time for her nap. And then Sherri calls and announces that she will take a bus up if Liz will meet her at the terminal. Sherri has always been afraid to travel long distances by bus, but when Liz mentions this, she says that last week’s incident has made her brave. She even feels brave enough to smoke outside the house for a night. She sounds cheerful. Liz doesn’t want a cheerful Sherri around, colluding with her seemingly cheerful children to make her cheerful too. But she can’t think how to explain that to her without hurting her feelings. She calls the bus terminal and then calls Sherri back to tell her that if she takes the four o’clock, she can pick her up at the terminal at six.

  More customers stream in in the afternoon. Some are browsers, but more make purchases. And of course they are all as cheerful as can be. Jake once taped a “kick me” sign on Liz’s back without her knowing it. No one did, but Katie and Jake had a wonderful time watching her move through the house unaware of the edict. Liz gets to thinking that maybe he’s taped another sign outside the door. I’m a volcano. I could erupt at any time. Smile at me. She is actually getting angry, but each time her anger rises to the surface, the shop door opens and the sound of some stranger’s laughter flies in.

  A few times during the course of the day she stops what she is doing to try to imagine what Pete and Gladys are up to at that moment. She sees them having lunch; and later, sitting side by side listening to the speakers, looking for all the world like all the other attendants, but filled with the anticipation of the coming night. These images vanish as soon as she conjures them up. They slide away and are quickly replaced by images of her sister enduring the dreaded bus ride just to visit with her, her kids behaving like angels for once, the man who handed her a check for $200, promising the rest when he picks up his order.

  At dinner, Jake surprises Liz by asking her whether she will take Katie and him to church the next morning in his father’s absence. They are eating the pizza Liz picked up along with Sherri. One of Jake’s heavy-metal groups is playing on the stereo—something Pete would never have stood for. The group is singing, as far as Liz can determine over the drumming and screech of the electric guitars, about the value of hatred in the world. “I thought you didn’t like going to church,” she says. “It seems to me that Daddy has to drag you every Sunday. I would have thought you’d be glad to have a day off.”

  “I have a reason,” Jake mumbles.

  She barely hears him over the roar of the music. “A reason for wanting to go to church tomorrow?”

  He nods and looks at his pizza.

  This interests her. Katie goes to religious instruction once a week after school and seems to enjoy it. She and Isabel intend to start reading the Bible as soon as their reading skills improve sufficiently. Jake used to go too, but only because Pete forced him. After his Confirmation, when the classes were no longer mandatory, he quit. He wanted to quit going to church as well, but Pete wouldn’t let him. Liz and Pete argued about it. She’d known plenty of people who had been forced to practice religion, herself included. As soon as they were old enough to have their own say about such matters, they turned away from it completely. In fact, they became dogmatic in their anti-religious sentiments. But Pete had a theory. He believed that most of those who turned away would come back one day, sometime when they were in their forties or fifties. He himself had broken away from his Catholic upbringing just after high school. When she met him, he never spoke about religio
n. Then, one day when Jake was about four, he asked Liz if she thought Jake should be getting some religious training. Even then Jake was a mischief-maker. Liz said she didn’t think it would hurt. And the very next Sunday Pete took him to church, and every Sunday thereafter. It was almost as if Pete had been wanting to go back to the church ever since high school, but was waiting for someone to give him permission … almost like him needing permission to be with Gladys. Liz used to tease him and ask him questions about the hereafter that she knew he couldn’t answer. Once he said to her, “My religion is a private matter. You can ask me about anything you like, but I won’t discuss the Church with you anymore. It’s off limits.”

  Pete goes to mass dutifully every Sunday and returns refreshed, renewed somehow, but he never speaks to Liz about the particularities of his renewal. And, since she’s not allowed to make jokes anymore, she never bothers to ask. The imposed suppression of the subject has taken all the fun out of it for her. Now it’s just a thing he does once a week, like her going grocery shopping on Mondays. She doesn’t think of him anymore as a religious man. If anything, she sees him as a superstitious one. If he goes to mass, she figures, it’s on the off-chance that there really is an afterlife. She doesn’t think he really believes in heaven. He just wants to have all those Sunday mass credits to his name in case it turns out that there is. Pete doesn’t like the look of an unturned stone. If there’s a flu going around, he wants everyone vaccinated—just in case. Once, when the red tide was tainting Maine shellfish, he insisted they stop eating shellfish altogether—just in case it had spread to other waters as well. No one in the house was allowed to take Tylenol for a full year after the cyanide incidents. The kids couldn’t eat candy after the razor blade incidents. When Pete’s uncle died in Florida, Pete and Liz had to take separate planes to attend the funeral so that if one crashed, the children wouldn’t be orphans. For all she knows, he probably steps over sidewalk cracks when he’s alone. He doesn’t go in the ocean since he saw Jaws, and he makes the kids turn off the TV at the first sign of thunder. He’s simply very, very cautious. Neurotic, she supposes, though of course he doesn’t see it that way. And for all his precautions, he lost a child anyway.

  But now it seems he’s throwing caution to the wind, risking the chance of gaining his conjectural heaven. That’s how important this thing with Gladys must be to him.

  She says to Jake, “If you tell me the reason, I’ll consider taking you.”

  “That’s not fair,” he snaps. He lifts his chin, his eyes rounding with indignation.

  Katie says, “Isabel and me want to go tomorrow too. You have to take us.”

  Sherri says, “If we go to church, can we go out for pancakes after it?”

  Liz looks at her. She is beaming with anticipation, her mouth wide open, her tongue sliding back and forth along her lower lip.

  “Okay,” Liz says, rolling her eyes just to let them all know that this is a major concession. “We’ll go to church, and then we’ll go for pancakes.” She turns to look at Brigit, who is sneezing.

  Sherri puts her pizza down so that she can raise both fists in victory. “Hooray,” she shouts. “Hooray for Lizzie and Jake and Katie and Brigit.”

  Brigit sneezes again. “I think I’ll call Mrs. Bowker to stay with Brigit though,” Liz says to Jake. “That won’t interfere with your plans, will it?”

  Around ten Liz locates the book she has been reading and makes herself a cup of tea. She is planning on taking both the book and the tea up to her room and brooding until she falls asleep. But at the last minute, she spills out the tea and retrieves a bottle of wine instead. Jake and Sherri are still in the living room playing Poker. Liz played a few hands with them earlier, but when she began to feel her submerged misery rising, she divided her winnings between them and left to salute it in privacy.

  Even with the door closed, she can hear them laughing downstairs. It is always a wonder to her that they get along as well as they do. She reads for awhile, until she no longer hears them and the house is quiet. Then, in her her half-empty bed with her empty wine bottle on the night table and the book upside down like a tent on her lap, she sets about being miserable in earnest.

  Knowing Pete, it’s unlikely that he took Gladys straight up to bed after dinner. It would be more like him to take her out for a drink, or, on such a delicious night, out for a stroll. He promised to visit her father, but she can’t imagine him driving there with Gladys, and she can’t imagine him leaving her to go alone. When he returns, he’ll have an excuse. The dinner was over too late, or he had reservations about driving his car to that part of the city. She can see him walking along with his hands in his pockets and Gladys’ arm looped through one of his. She sees him smiling, his eyes floating in their sockets, walking just a little too fast, chatting about everything they encounter. If they pass an antique shop, Pete will pull her up to the window and tell her how to determine the value of antiques, the best way to re-finish them, the ones his grandmother had in her farmhouse. If they come across a gallery, Pete will tell her about Matisse, his favorite. He’ll listen and nod when she reveals hers. He’ll add some little-known detail to whatever she says. He is a walking encyclopedia. Gladys will be impressed.

  Liz feels a spark of the real emotion that she’s been hankering after all day, or, more accurately, ever since she and Pete had lunch together. It pleases her. But the instant she acknowledges the pleasure, the emotion itself begins to dissolve. In her effort to sustain it, she removes the book from her lap, turns out the light, and concentrates. Now it seems to her that she can almost hear Pete’s thoughts. She sees Gladys and him retreating from the gallery where he stopped to impress her with his knowledge. He has just looked at his watch and concluded that it’s getting late. He is anxious to return to the hotel—to his room or hers. His unruffled demeanor is going to seed now as he wonders whose room it should be. He left Liz the number in case of an emergency. What if she calls, he’ll be wondering, and hears Gladys laugh in the background? What if she recognizes the irregularity of his breathing for what it is? What if? That’s what he’s saying to himself now. He’ll prefer to go to her room. Then, if Liz tells him later that she called but didn’t get any answer, he can always say he was asleep. He is a heavy sleeper. But how to get her there? It’s much less awkward to invite her to his room for a drink than to ask her if he can come to hers. But what if Liz calls her room looking for him and finds him there? There are more ‘what-ifs’ than Liz can ever account for. Only Pete could think of them all.

  MARTHA

  Martha Bowker puts aside the book she has been trying to read and smiles at the telephone as if it were a friend. Calls that come in the early evening usually startle her, because her cronies all retire about then, and her daughter never calls until much later, when her children are all put to bed. But when the phone rang some hours ago, she knew, she intuited, that she was about to become the recipient of tidings of the highest order—a call to arms, as it turned out.

  Liz indicated that she would need Martha only for a short time in the morning, but Martha thinks that even an hour will suffice. She will be sitting only for the little one after all. She swings her gaze from the telephone to the camera on her dresser. She checked it earlier. The battery was fine; she had only to install a fresh roll of film and attach the close-up lens.

  She reaches into her night table drawer and retrieves the floor plans that she made some months ago, the first time she was asked to sit with the Arroway children at their house. They depict all the chests, closets, drawers, and other places where a person might hide something. Of course she doesn’t need them anymore, but it still gives her a thrill to look at them, to recall with what dread and diligence she drew them up. She puts them aside and sighs as she remembers how upset she was when Liz first opened her shop and hired that foolish college girl to baby-sit (though she handled that matter easily enough) and then how elated when she first located Pete’s journal and had read enough to know that Liz kept one too.
That was when she knew she had something. That was when she saw the necessity of investing in the camera.

  Which is not to say that it went effortlessly after that. In fact, Martha can’t think of another person she knows who would not have given up the mission altogether. Pete’s journal, for example, though copious in its concerns (everything from ideas for works in progress to the amount of tip left at lunch) is scanty in its locution. Since it is kept unlocked in the top drawer of his desk, Martha assumed that his one-word exclamations and sentence fragments were meant to constitute a kind of code. She recalls a sample entry: 15 … Highway … Jackless … Suck for vacuums? Nonsuch … Six calls, one go … Ribs 8.75/1.25 … Three calls, no go … Doc T: AOK, into the wind … Meat-loaf … LJ: following sea. Martha shakes her head and considers with what pain she learned to decipher his system.

  Liz’s diary entries, on the other hand, tend toward excess. But her writing is clear, and thus, except in the few places where some compression was in order or where it was necessary for Martha to insert an explanatory sentence or two so as to illuminate a particular reference, she had little more to do than convert the pertinent entries into that which would conform to the style and format she chose to adopt for her notes.

  Jake does not keep a journal, as far as Martha has been able to determine. The first of the two compositions that she used in preparing her notes was written on a piece of loose-leaf paper which was crumbled at the bottom of an old backpack (along with some love notes from three different girls). She found it behind the box that holds his G.I. Joe collection in the closet. The second she came upon only a few days ago, when Liz called unexpectedly to ask her to stay with Brigit so that she could have lunch with Pete. The report, which was in his English Composition notebook, established, for once and for all, the source and inspiration for all the bloodcurdling screams that Martha had to endure last weekend. The teacher for whom Jake wrote it (Martha laughs aloud as she attempts to imagine his or her reaction) gave it a B-and wisely refrained from further comment. But her true find, which Martha discovered that same afternoon, was Sherri Crum’s diary.