“I can’t feel anything with Helena anymore.” He hadn’t known he would say this. Maizie regarded him, seemed to be waiting for him to go on. When he tried to speak, his voice broke. He took a breath, swallowed, not looking at her. “The whole thing’s done something to me inside, Maizie. I keep hectoring her all the time and I can feel myself doing it and I can’t make myself stop. She’s trying to love me and make me feel better, and everything she says, everything she says just irritates me more. The sound of her voice—I feel crowded all the time, and when I look at her I see only a—a body. Meat.”
Maizie took his arm. “What?”
“I can’t explain it,” Brewer said.
“Don’t be so morbid. Try not to be morbid, that’s all.”
“I’m—I don’t feel anything.”
“That’ll pass,” Maizie said. “I’ve felt that way before.”
“No,” Brewer said, “it’s not that. I do feel something. I feel like I can’t stand to have her around me.”
“I’m telling you it’s been the same with me.”
They were watching Leo walk across the far field.
“I know I love him,” Maizie said, “but I can’t talk to him about this. There’s a man at work. A nice, quiet, dignified guy, not even very good-looking or flashy, you know, maybe forty-five. Funny and friendly and I—we got to be pretty close friends. I’d talk to him about Leo sometimes. And he’d tell me about his wife and his stepson. We were friendly and we made each other laugh. And not long ago there was a—this thing passed between us. We’d been such dear friends. And sometimes Leo’s so—stiff and formal, like a kid trying to be grown-up. Everything is so self-improvement-oriented with him. Do you know he spends an hour every night with a thesaurus? And when he talks sometimes I can feel him bending the conversation around so he can say another one of his words. It irritates me sometimes, and sometimes it endears him to me in a funny kind of way. Because he wants to be better for me. He’s really doing it for me.”
James watched her comb through her hair with her long fingers. The wind blew, and lifted it, and she pushed it back again.
“Anyway, I got to where I was thinking about this nice man at work. Do you see?”
In the field, her husband threw a handful of stones at the lifting dark shapes of the vultures. He whooped and shouted, running at them.
“Nothing really happened,” she went on. “But it could’ve been pretty serious. And for a while there when it was going on, whenever I was with Leo I felt—I was restless, and even a little bored. It was as if I didn’t want him there, and I worried about whether or not I loved him anymore. And now Mother. I don’t know. I’ve been talking to the guy, the one—I’ve been talking to him about it all. It’s like there isn’t anything I can say to Leo about Mother. Nothing Leo doesn’t know. And he was always so gaga about all of us. You know how he’s been. But I’ve felt the need to talk about it, and so I talk to this, this friend. It’s all perfectly innocent, and I still feel guilty sometimes but I’m not letting that bother me. I’m doing what I need to do for myself right now, to get through, and I’m not worrying about why or wherefore because I know that’s all just—this. You know? This by itself—Mother checking out on us. And with me five months pregnant. Just this and not anything else.”
“I hate this dead feeling,” Brewer said. “I feel dead.”
“Maybe that’s Mother’s part in us. Did you ever think that? An element of her that made her do it is in us, too. And isn’t that a sweet thought. Look, you just have to wait for it to pass, go about life a certain way until it passes, that’s all. Wait it out and try to be as kind and gentle as possible until it goes away. And then you—you’re sort of in the habit of being kind.”
“And you feel that way with Leo now? I mean we always told each other everything, Maizie, and you can tell me, can’t you? Do you feel like having Leo near you might drive you out of your mind?”
She shrugged. The wind lifted her hair again. The expression on her face was that of a person steeling herself against something. “At times. Haven’t you been listening to me, James?”
“You feel it now?”
“Come on,” she said. “You’re fine.”
“I’m afraid I’m losing my mind,” he said.
Now she did give forth a bitter deprecating laugh. “That’s apparently a thing we know for sure now. It runs in the family.”
“I’m serious,” Brewer said, wrapping his arms tight around himself.
“You’re not losing your mind,” said Maizie. “Look what we’ve been through. Look what you’ve been through.”
“I don’t know anything anymore,” he said. “God. I love her. I mean I think I love her. But I keep seeing Mom in that awful little motel room, and then Helena talks to me and I can’t stand the sound of her voice.”
Leo had started back down to the creek. Behind him, the birds sat in their tree, all uncomprehending patience. To them, Leo was like the weather gathering and staggering toward them on the wind. He was something to be waited out. Down in the creek bottom, he bent over the trapped calf, and then he started up to where Maizie and her brother were. “I guess I look pretty silly,” he said when he had reached them. He was a tall, nervous, sometimes awkwardly friendly man with a way of looking aside when he spoke, and an air of perpetual surprise about him. It was in his eyes, a way he had of staring with raised brows. As with most other people, Brewer liked him without being particularly able to describe his qualities. For the past two weeks or so Leo had been using most of his spare time to fix up a room for the old man in his and Maizie’s house. He worked for the county government as an office manager, a job at which he excelled, but he knew carpentry and some masonry, having come from people who believed in the healthy practice of finding work to do with one’s hands, no matter what one did to put food on the table. In fact, he knew enough and had the skills to build his own house, a thing he and Maizie were planning to do one day.
“I guess I didn’t do much but make a lot of noise,” he said now.
“A man railing against nature,” Maizie said, and squeezed her brother’s arm.
“Too much,” said Leo, looking back toward the creek. “I hate the way the world works sometimes.”
“Oh, shut up,” Maizie said. “You’re not helping anything.” But she kissed him on the side of the face.
“Well, anyway, it’s over. The heart’s stopped finally.”
“Oh, Christ,” Maizie said. “Let’s go inside.” She took a step and seemed to falter.
“I’m sorry, honey.”
She clung to him. Brewer stayed back and watched them as they walked toward the house, and then he followed. For a while they didn’t speak. Brewer could feel the lining of his own stomach. Lightning flashed somewhere behind them, and Maizie said, “Good Lord,” picking up the pace. They reached the driveway as the first drops of rain hit, and abruptly Brewer found that he couldn’t go back inside, couldn’t face the others yet. “You guys, tell Helena I’m going to sit the storm out here. I want to watch it here.” He stepped to his car and opened the door. The rain was coming hard, and his sister had stopped to speak to him. “What’re you going to do?” The rain pelted them. “Do you want me to stay with you?”
“Go ahead. I need a little time alone.”
“Are you okay?”
The question seemed almost aggressively beside the point. He said, “Go ahead. I’m fine.”
“Come on, you guys,” Leo called. “It’s lightning.”
“You’re not going anywhere, are you?” Maizie said.
And Brewer thought about how for the two of them it would always be like this. Some element of their being together would always contain a watchfulness.
“Maizie, I’m just going to sit here a while.”
“Suit yourself,” said his sister in the tone of someone choosing to dismiss her own doubts. She went on, and when her husband took her arm, the two of them hurried to the entrance of the house and in. He saw them go
past Helena, whose gestures showed first puzzlement and then embarrassment. Helena stood in the doorway, looking out through the wind-driven rain. Brewer waved once, and after a moment she waved back. She was probably crying, worrying about him. He waved again, knowing this, and then she went back into the kitchen, where, he knew, she would try to put the best face on things, smiling and pretending that she wasn’t suffering at his hands.
He simply needed the time to compose himself.
In the other direction, illuminated by a vein of lightning across the whole length of the sky, the ugly birds clung to their perch. He caught a glimpse of them, five black tears in the crooked branches. He was thinking about how they would soon enough be continuing with what they had begun down in the creek bed, because it was in their nature to do so and because choosing did not even enter into it and because they were always, always the same. Brewer watched them through the flashes of lightning. He shivered, holding his arms around himself, and the storm went on. He remembered his mother running across the lawn in a storm like this, with a winter coat held up over her head. She laughed and got in under the eaves of the porch, shaking the moisture from her hair and talking. That was not a woman who hated life. Brewer remembered that her hair made a damp place on the shoulders of the white blouse she wore, and oh, when was that? When was that? He could never have imagined it. And he could never believe or forgive it, either. The rain kept coming. The sky grew darker, but against the lightning the birds were still visible. The black hulking shapes sat unmoving in the branches of the tree.
PENANCE
PERHAPS IT WASN’T much of a puzzle after all, if you really thought about it, why a person decides that enough is enough in this life, and then acts on it. So Gehringer thought, pulling into his own driveway, home from another strained day at work, discouraged, tired, thinking about a stranger’s suicide. Before him, his house shone in the afternoon sun; the sharp shade on the porch gave a luster to the white clapboards and the railing. He came to a slow stop and let the car idle a moment, gazing at the demarcations of shade and light. It was a pleasant, roomy old place, and he had always felt so much at home in it.
When his wife crossed the front window and glanced at him, he got out and made his way up the walk. Yesterday’s storms had shaken some of the branches out of the trees and caused the creek to overflow, and now the fields beyond the lawn looked badly rumpled and unkempt. The grass stood up, showing the dark mud beneath. In one corner of the near pasture, in the shade of the big oak tree there, three cows stood chewing, staring at him. The sky was clear blue, and a crisp, cool breeze blew. It was all only itself. All futile, somehow.
And here he was, with these uncharacteristic thoughts. One person’s refusal to go on living made others turn and look at their own lives.
He believed he understood it.
Everything in the house was discouragingly spotless. Abigail had spent another day going over the place, top to bottom, like someone trying to eradicate the vestiges of illness. Making his way through the polished, shining family room to the kitchen, he found her down on her knees, scrubbing the baseboards. “I’m home,” he said, trying to take a normal tone.
She said, “I saw you pull in.”
He put the car keys in their place on the hook above the sink. “The field looks like a hurricane went through.” He watched her work. “Didn’t you do that on Friday?”
She said, “Jason’s flunking math, too, now.”
He moved to the kitchen window and looked out. His stepson was shooting baskets. The ball swished through the net and dropped into a puddle of rainwater at the base of the pole. Jason picked the ball up, holding it away from himself, and dried it off with a terry cloth towel.
“Did you hear what I said?” she asked.
“I was wondering if you heard what I said.”
“I heard you, Marty. This needs doing.”
“No it doesn’t,” he said. “No it doesn’t.”
She worked on.
“Isn’t math Jason’s favorite subject?”
“If you were more involved, you’d know it was.”
“I think I did know, Gail. I said, ‘Isn’t math his favorite subject?’ I knew, see. And so I asked. The question was reflexive.”
She said, “Math was his favorite subject.”
He watched her moving along the floor, concentrating on the work. It was unnerving. “Can I help?” he said.
She didn’t answer.
“I’ll spell you, if you want,” he said. “We could take turns. We’ll eat off the floor when we finish, to celebrate having a house cleaner than a hospital. What do you say?”
“Cute.”
He paused, thinking she might say more. There was the sound of the ball hitting the rim outside. “Well, what should we do? You want me to talk to him?”
“We can’t do anything yet about the math,” she said. “His teacher sent home a note that he’d be putting together a list of tutors for us to go through. I’ve set up a conference with Mrs. Brill about the English grade. We were supposed to have one with her a while back, you might remember, and it didn’t work out. I want you to come with me.”
He chose to ignore her tone. “Have you talked to Jason about it?”
“Yes.”
“What’s he say?”
“He says she has something against him.”
“You believe that?”
His wife looked up at him, then went back to her scrubbing.
“Well, kids have been known to bend the truth about these things, Gail.”
“Just come with me and we’ll find out.”
“I’d be glad to,” he said. “When is it?”
“We have to leave in half an hour.” She kept on working, moving along the kitchen floor.
“Gail,” he said.
“What.”
“Shouldn’t you start getting ready?”
“I am. Just a minute.”
“Everything’s so clean,” he said.
She said nothing.
“We ought to have people over so they can see it. Remember Celie—what the hell was her last name?—the one who was always redoing her walls. You used to make fun of her.”
“I don’t remember making fun of her.”
“Oh, yes. You were wicked about it.”
“I’m almost finished here,” she said. “Are you ready to go?”
“I was asking you about Celie. Was her name Celie?”
“Yes.”
“Wonder whatever happened to her. You used to have such a lot of fun laughing at how she was about her house.”
“What are you telling me, Marty?”
“You don’t really need it spelled out, do you?” he said.
“Look, are you coming with me or not?”
“I said I was. You’re the one who needs to get ready to go.”
“Won’t take me a second,” she said.
Outside, Jason bounced the basketball, playing an imaginary game. Gehringer saw the look of excitement and seriousness in the boy’s face.
“I told him not to get dirty,” Abigail said.
“He’s just shooting baskets,” said Gehringer.
She went on working.
“Gail,” he said.
“What.”
“Honey, look at me.”
She did so. There was a kind of tolerance in her face.
“Nothing happened, understand? Nothing’s changed. I know I keep saying that. But there’s nothing going on at all.”
“I don’t want to think about it now,” she said.
He let another moment pass. Then he went to the sink and got a dishcloth and began wiping the spotless counter. “Isn’t this nice? We’re cleaning together.”
“I don’t need your sarcasm, either,” she said.
“I’m not being sarcastic. I’m saying isn’t it nice, we’re cleaning together, and in a little while we’ll go to Jason’s school together and we’ll be just like a family.”
“You don’t have t
o go hold Maizie Brewer’s hand?”
“Well, I thought you might not get around to saying it. And it’s not Brewer. She’s married, Gail. Remember? She’s expecting a baby.”
“Does she know whose?”
“That is a completely shitty thing to say. That’s not fair, and you know it.”
“I haven’t had a lot of time to think about being fair, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Nothing ever happened. Can you understand that nothing happened? And I swear to Christ you take us farther away from each other every day.”
She went on scrubbing the baseboard.
“Stop that and listen to me.”
She straightened. “You’re spending time with her again when you said you’d avoid her.”
“Nothing happened the first time and nothing’s happening now. But I work with her, and she’s going through some hell right now over the death of her mother. It’s only the simple concern of a friend.”
“And there’s no one else she can turn to?”
The look of pain in his wife’s face hurt him. “Everybody else turns to her. Please, honey. Don’t do this. I’m telling you there’s nothing going on.”
She went back to her work. “I’m almost through,” she said. “I won’t take long.”
“Gail,” he said. “Really.”
“These explanations,” she said. “They hurt me. I don’t want to hear anymore.”
“No,” he said. “I know. But honey, nothing’s changed. Nothing ever changed.”
“Please,” she said.
“For Christ’s sake,” Gehringer told her. “You’re doing this to yourself.”
She shook her head.
“I have been a faithful husband,” he said. “I may not have been as attentive as I ought to be, but I have been faithful.”
“Will you please let me finish this?” she said.
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