by Susan Perabo
A boy died.
SWITZERLAND
The suitcase I drag down the attic stairs belonged to my grandmother, so it’s one of those old-time deals that already weighs about fifty pounds even without a stitch of clothing in it. I have a photograph of my grandmother with this suitcase. She’s standing on the tarmac about to get on an airplane—this was a long time ago, right, when you walked up the stairs onto the plane—that’s going to take her to New York and then on to Switzerland, to visit her lifelong pen pal that she started writing to when she was in third grade or something. So she’s standing on the windy tarmac, all smiles despite the fact she looks like she’s about to be blown off her feet, with this giant suitcase next to her. She’s not holding it, ’cause this is the kind of suitcase that even if you just stop for a couple seconds, to have your picture taken, you want to put it down. That’s how heavy it is, and when I drag it down the attic stairs it goes ka-thunk ka-thunk ka-thunk and I can hear the cats scatter.
The cats. I’ll have to leave them. When a woman walks out on her husband she can’t take her cats along. How would that look? “I’m leaving you, but hold on a minute while I wrangle these cats into the car.” That’s no kind of exit to make. So maybe I’ll come back for them. Maybe in a couple months, when I’m settled someplace else, I’ll show up in the middle of the day, while he’s at work, and I’ll use my key (because he wouldn’t change the locks . . . it wouldn’t even occur to him) and then I’ll gather the cats up, one at a time, in a heavy blanket so they don’t scratch me to death when they see I’m putting them in the car.
By the time I have the suitcase mostly packed (the essentials—your basic toiletries, the book from the bedside table, underwear and socks and the kind of clothes one would travel in, nothing fancy) it’s 4:30 and he’ll be rolling in in about fifteen, twenty minutes. By that time I’ll have everything straightened and I’ll be standing at the door putting on my coat, just slipping my arms into the sleeves as he walks in, so I’m ready to pick up the suitcase and go at just that moment, so I don’t have to run back and go to the bathroom or put on my shoes or anything.
His face. It’ll go blank first, like somebody’s asked him a question in a foreign language. The smile he’s worn through the door will sink into his face like cream into coffee. Then, after the blank look, his eyes will narrow, first at the suitcase and then at me. This will only last a moment. The wheels in his head will be turning. At this moment I might feel a little sorry for him. What did I do to deserve this? he’ll be thinking. I come home from a normal day of work, thinking everything is A-OK, and here’s my wife in the front hall with her suitcase packed and her coat on. But he won’t say any of this. Instead, he’ll swallow really hard, so hard it’s like he’s trying to get down a pill the size of his fist. Right now he’ll be thinking that he can’t cry, but he’ll want to. He’ll be thinking about all the things he should have done differently, how he should have treated me better, how that girl he liked wasn’t worth all this.
I wish I had a pen pal in Switzerland. When is it too late to have a lifelong pen pal? Does it count if you start when you’re twenty-five? Thirty-five? What if you pretended you were ten? What if you wrote a ten-year-old girl in Switzerland—found her somehow, you know, through the internet or something—and you pretended you were in third grade and your whole life was in front of you and you had all these dreams? Would that be a rotten thing to do? How disappointed would she be when you got off the plane with your big blue suitcase and instead of being ten you were a grown woman? Would she hate you? Or would she just be surprised, and then she’d get over it, and you could still go stay at her Swiss house and eat Swiss-cheese sandwiches and curl up to sleep in a cozy Swiss sleeping bag?
I make the bed. It seems right that I should make the bed, that I should do the dishes, that everything should be just so. I shouldn’t leave the house in ruins. It’s better if everything is perfect, so he can watch it go to hell once I’m gone. I shake the pillows snug into their pillowcases, imagining how long it will be before the sheets are washed again, how long he’ll sleep alone on dirty sheets, how that girl he liked (It was five years ago, for Chrissakes! he’ll think as he falls asleep on his dirty sheets, as if that makes a difference, as if having cancer for five years is better than having it for one) is with someone else now and now he’s got nobody, not her, not me, only two disillusioned old cats. Which I’ll be coming back for.
I reach the front hall just in time. I’m opening the closet for my coat when I hear his car outside, the squawk of the brakes, the sigh of the motor, the familiar sounds of his homecoming. I’ve got my coat on and my keys in my hand, and I pick up the giant suitcase, which must weigh, no joke, fifty pounds. I don’t know how she got this thing all the way to Switzerland, my grandmother. I see the doorknob turn and it’s in slow-motion—really, it is—like a movie when the murderer figures out you’re hiding behind the shower curtain and he’s coming for you, finally, and you’ve got nothing but a bottle of shampoo to defend yourself with.
He steps into the hall and takes everything in. His eyes linger on the suitcase, which I’m struggling to keep from dropping. His heart, his pathetic little heart, is crumbling.
“Jesus, Tina,” he says. “Not again.”
“There’s no ‘not again’ about it,” I say. My arm is about to fall off. “This is it.”
“Honey.” He puts his hand on my cheek. “Honey, really. Aren’t you tired of dragging that thing around?
“I love you,” he says. “You know that. I know you know that.”
He says: “Come on. There you go. That’s my girl.”
He says: “How ’bout we get a pizza?”
END OF DAYS
We had finished up our graduate work some time ago, more than one year, less than five. Now it was May again and a new group was marching off into the world with their theses (they called them books, but we knew better) clutched warmly to their breasts. Some of them had secured jobs and others were pursuing additional meaningless degrees and we mocked and insulted each one of them as Rob’s Ford Escort station wagon soared boldly through the night on the back roads of northwest Arkansas on the way to the next battered newspaper tube. This had been Rob’s job for three months, his most recent in a string of positions that could have been handled with ease by a crack-smoking seventeen-year-old. Andy and I had joined him on his route this night because, for one, we were all best friends, and for two, we needed a new experience to rehash in the coming months.
“Dibs on this story,” Andy said from the backseat. Andy was really a poet (thus, the backseat) but like all poets he had a fat notebook full of story ideas that he was certain he would someday write.
“It’s my crap job,” Rob said, lighting a cigarette. “So it’s my story.”
“I hate stories about writers,” I said, slugging from the extra-large coffee Andy had brought me from the bagel place where he worked. “You know who never wrote a story about a writer? Chekhov. He didn’t—”
“It’s not going to be about a writer,” Rob said. “It’s about a guy who has a retarded brother and the retarded brother wants to help the guy deliver his newspapers, so finally the guy lets him come along and when he gets out of the car to take a piss the retarded brother drives off with the car and all the newspapers.”
“Then what?” Andy asked.
“Then nothing,” Rob said. “That’s the end.”
“Did you already write it?” I asked.
“Not yet,” he said.
“Good,” I said. “Because it sucks.”
I took a smoke from his pack of off-brand cigarettes; they were so cheap they didn’t even have a name. Back when we were in the program, living large off our stipends, it was Marlboros and Camels all the way. But no more. What money we had went toward five-dollar pitchers at Buzzards, three or four nights a week. When even that was more than we could afford, we hung out in Andy’s windowless apartment, watching fifty-cent rentals from Blockbuster. For a while Andy�
��s girlfriend watched with us, but she had been gone a while now, six months, maybe a year.
“Somebody already wrote that story anyway,” Andy said. “I read something just like that in a Best American.”
“You did not,” Rob said.
“I did. That whole retarded brother thing. It’s like a Denis Johnson or a Rick Bass story or—”
“I hate Rick Bass,” I said. “I hate that guy.”
“You just hate him because he called you out when he was here,” Rob said.
“What did he say again?” Andy asked, leaning into the front seat, like he hadn’t heard the story a hundred and eighty-five times before.
Rob grinned. “He told her she was like an ice-skater doing a bunch of fancy jumps and spins in a dark, empty arena.”
“I can see where he’s coming from,” Andy said.
“Shut up,” I said. “Anyway, that’s not why I hate him. He’s just totally overrated.”
“At least he’s rated,” Rob said. “You can’t be overrated until you’re rated, right?”
He slid up next to an old house and stuffed the paper into the tube. It was three in the morning but a couple lights were on inside, and I imagined the guy who lived there sitting at his kitchen table eating a bologna sandwich. There were two cigarettes burning in the ashtray, one his, and one belonging to the woman who’d just gotten up and gone to the bedroom closet to get her beat-up suitcase. It was just like that Carver story. Actually, it was just like a lot of Carver stories.
“Who wrote The Paperboy?” Andy asked. “Did Barry Hannah write that?”
“The Paperboy’s a kid’s book,” Rob said. He’d know. His boy was five or six. Or maybe nine. He had a wife, too. She was the long-suffering type, made about a nickel an hour working as a teacher’s aide at the elementary school. Back when we all first met she tried to talk to me like we were one and the same, rolled out the whole girl-bonding red carpet. When that didn’t work out she thought I might be trying to steal Rob away from her (such a catch, Rob, with his paper route and plotless stories), and after that she just kind of gave up on me altogether. She wasn’t alone. At this point, people were lining up outside my door to give up on me. In the gathering crowd I could see parents, siblings, college roommates, disgusted boyfriends. “Take a number!” I’d call to them while fetching rejections from my mailbox.
“Nah,” Andy said. “There’s a story called that, too. Or maybe it’s not The Paperboy. I know it’s Paper something.”
“Paper Moon.”
“The Paper Chase.”
“ ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’ ”
“God, I hate that story,” I said. “They’re always trotting it out. I swear to god it’s assigned in every single Western Lit class on campus.”
“ ’Cause it’s by a woman,” Rob said. “You gotta get your women in, you know. Not a lot of choices.”
“Only about a hundred thousand Joyce Carol Oates stories to choose from,” Andy said.
“I hate Joyce Carol Oates,” I said.
“You gotta have two women,” Rob said to Andy, ignoring me. “So Oates doesn’t seem like your token.”
“Alice Walker works,” I said. “She’s a twofer.”
“If only she were blind,” Rob said. “Then she’d be a three-fer.” He threw his cigarette out the window. “I’m a no-fer,” he said. “I’m doomed. I swear to god I’m thinking about changing my middle name to Little Feather. I’m not kidding. It’s the only way I’m ever getting a real job.”
Rob and Andy often spoke longingly of The Real Job. But they were white guys without books—they didn’t think it was even worth the stamps. Not that they’d ever tried. When I pictured myself with The Real Job, the person who was supposedly me was dressed in hip clothes I didn’t own and walking professorially across a sunshiny campus, calling clever greetings to eager-faced undergraduates in a voice that was so far from mine it might as well have been dolphin squeaks.
Something briefly flashed ahead of us. It was a deer, standing just off the road, its eyes locked on us as we approached. It watched as we slowly passed, still as a statue, like if it didn’t move we wouldn’t see it.
“You guys know that poem by Stafford?” Andy asked in a whisper. “That one where the guy hits the deer and then there’s a baby deer or something and he kills it?”
“I hate that poem,” I said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“How do you know? You ever hit a deer?”
“How much longer?” I asked Rob, readjusting my seat belt so that it wasn’t pressing against my bladder. The extra-large coffee had been a serious mistake; for some reason it hadn’t occurred to me that there wouldn’t be a Taco Bell out here where I could stop to pee.
Rob wasn’t paying attention. “What’s that story where those guys are deer hunting and one of them shoots the other one?” he asked. “You know what I’m talking about? Who wrote that story?”
“It was in Best American,” Andy said. “Like maybe two years ago.”
“No, this is an old story,” Rob said.
“It’s Tobias Wolff,” I said. “I know that story. I could write that stupid story with my brain tied behind my back.”
“So write it,” Rob said, flipping on his brights as we turned farther into the dark. “Jeez, write anything, why don’t you?”
“Hey, now,” Andy said, sitting back in his seat. “Easy there, cowboy.”
Rob had broken the Rule of Rules: Don’t talk about somebody’s work unless that person introduces the topic first. At this stage in our careers (if you could call them that) there was no such thing as friendly encouragement; there was only nail-biting, hair-whitening, heartburn-inducing pressure. Each of us teetered minute by minute on the line between undiscovered genius and complete loser. Why Rob suddenly felt he could nudge me off the line—the late hour? the back road?—I couldn’t imagine. But now the gloves were off.
“Don’t start with me,” I said. “When’s the last time you finished a story?”
“Last week,” he said.
“Let me rephrase that. When’s the last time you sold a story? When’s the last time you actually—”
“At least I have work out there. At least I’m not—”
“Come on, you guys,” Andy said. “We’re on an adventure.”
We were quiet for a moment. Then Rob said: “An adventure on the roooooooad to nowhere. Aren’t we something special?”
He turned on the radio. Behind a wall of static you could barely make out the thrum of a bass line. It might have been The Who. Rob turned it up and only the static got louder.
The truth, known to no one but these two, was that I hadn’t finished a story in over a year. In the program I’d been consistently productive, scored a few decent publications, seemed to everyone (me humbly included) to be headed somewhere. And since then I’d had the ideal job for writing, a sweet gig anyone in my wobbly position would have killed for: I was the monitor at one of the emptiest computer centers on campus. I fixed a few paper jams, rebooted a couple hard drives, but mostly my time was my own. A quiet room with my choice of workstation—I could have written twenty pages a day. But I had a far more important matter to attend to: solitaire. I played so much my vision was blurred by lunchtime; by midafternoon my neck and back were so stiff that I couldn’t bend to pick a pencil off the floor. Diamonds and hearts danced behind my eyelids when I went to bed, but the next day I hurried (sometimes literally hurried, excited by the possibility of, um, what?) back for more. It was worse than nicotine, worse than beer. Then, at some point, I’d remember with a gust of guilt who I was and what I was supposed to be doing. Every few weeks, say, I’d screw up my courage and begin work on a new story. I’d go like gangbusters for three and one-quarter pages and then, in one terrible instant on the top of page four, I’d see exactly where the whole thing was going and everything that was going to be wrong with it. And so I’d abandon it, hit the solitaire hard, and a few weeks later start the whole process over again.
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“I heard Dave Springer got an NEA,” Andy said cheerfully.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, spinning around to face him. “Why don’t you just cut off my fingers and bury me alive? Really, I’d prefer that.”
“Sorry,” Andy said. “I was just making conversation. He was a nice guy, you know? Remember that party he—”
“He was terrible,” I said. “And he was a total kiss-ass.”
“Every time a friend succeeds, a little part of me dies,” Rob said wistfully.
His statement (which I was about to point out he’d borrowed from Oscar Wilde) was punctuated by the explosion of the rear passenger-side tire. The car veered left, into the absence of oncoming traffic, and Rob pulled it back and rolled slowly to a stop onto the grassy shoulder.
“At least it’s not the middle of the night and we’re not in the middle of nowhere,” Andy said.
Rob snatched the two remaining newspapers and got out of the car, then flung each of them as far as he could into the darkness. “Finished the route,” he said. “Now we just got to get home.”
“Got a spare?” Andy called from the backseat.
“Not anymore,” Rob said. “I used it last month.”
“And you didn’t replace it?” I asked. I grabbed the cigarettes and followed him out of the car. My bladder was officially full to capacity. “Are there any houses nearby?”