City of Boys

by Beth Nugent

  She stops to look at the flamingos in front of the hotel; if they didn’t move, they could pass for plastic, as stiff and as pink as those she saw occasionally on some of the more adventurous lawns back in Indiana. She waits now until she’s seen each bird move before she turns toward her house.

  Before she can get inside, Mrs. Walker calls out to her, and as Florence walks across the yard, she feels as though she is skimming lightly over the surface of the gravel, though she knows it must be sharp and hard.

  —Look, Mrs. Walker says. She holds her palms up to Florence. —It’s a sign. God sent me a sign. After all these years. She looks up into the blazing sky, then at Florence. —What does it mean? she says. —Who do I call?

  Florence looks at her hands; they are covered by deep spidery creases and dry age.

  —There’s nothing there, Florence says, and Mrs. Walker looks down at her palms, then leans forward in her chair and rubs them in the gravel.

  —Look, she says. —Look again. It’s a miracle.

  When she lifts her hands, blood stains the white rocks, and Florence can feel something rising inside her. Across the ocean, saints are stirring, and the Pope gazes idly at the feet of his prelate, noticing for the first time how soft they are, how white the skin; his mind moves against the thought and blood stains the delicate white toes. A miracle. Florence closes her eyes.

  —There’s nothing there, she says, and turns toward her house.

  —Wait, Mrs. Walker says. —Wait. Florence looks back at her; she is gazing down at her hands, but the rocks around her are perfectly white, perfectly raked but for the deep furrows of the rocker.

  Florence wakes to what she is sure are the sounds of Marybeth and Louis making love. She can hear his hand stroke Marybeth’s skin, the soft whisper of her hair. She feels as if she is lying in flames, except for a cold weight on her stomach, and she is surprised to find that it is her own hand. She moves it to her face, to touch the dry burning skin, and imagines Marybeth holding her arms out to Louis, the scrape of her thin fingers along his back; she can see the pulse beat in his neck as he bends to kiss her, and he is thinking about nothing at all, nothing but a wide stretch of sand, and beyond that the glittering sea.

  She rises and stands at the door, listening for their voices, but when she walks into the kitchen, their heads are bent over a game of cards; Louis is staring at Marybeth as he slaps down a card, and she snatches it up.

  —Ha, she says. —I knew you were going to do that.

  She spreads her cards out across the table. —Gin, she says, and begins to count up her points. Florence rustles forward, and they turn to look at her with big empty eyes.

  —You look terrible, Marybeth says. —You must be burning up. You should draw her a cold bath, she says to Louis. —With vinegar. She closes her eyes a moment. —Or maybe it’s tomato juice. I don’t know. She goes back to her cards, then looks up at Louis. —You really should, she says, and he pushes his chair back.

  —I think I just need some air, Florence says, and walks past them.

  Louis looks up at her helplessly, and Marybeth adds her points to the total score on a piece of paper. Louis’s cards are all low, threes and fives and sixes, while Marybeth’s hand is full of jacks and queens.

  Outside, it has grown almost dark; the little houses cast shadows that turn the gravel gray and dirty. Florence tries again to remember what it was she read about the evening sun, the quality of the light; but except for the shadows, it seems no different from the light at any other time of day. Inside, Marybeth and Louis lay out cards, pick them up, lay them out again, and do not think of her. All the lights are lit in Mrs. Walker’s house. Soon, perhaps tomorrow, her husband’s children will come for her, but for now she moves from room to room in a frenzy of faith, her face changing and changing back again. Florence sits in Mrs. Walker’s chair and rocks gently; underneath the crackling gravel, earth and ashes stir, and she closes her eyes to wait, breathing in the dark sulphur of the air.

  Going

  Anne leans her head out the car window into the rush of hot air and tries to remember just exactly where it was that she decided to leave David. Cincinnati, she thinks it was, or perhaps Cleveland. It was on the edge of some large Ohio city beginning with C, and she wants to be sure which one; she wants to be able always to think back on this decision and remember it exactly, to have a place and a name to attach to it. Oh that’s right, she will be able to say, it was in Cincinnati that I finally decided to end it; then, for the rest of her life, Cincinnati will have gained this relevance, and every time she hears the name or sees it, she will be reminded of David, and it will keep her from going back to him, or to someone like him. It will be like a charm whose magic is clear only to her, and now she can’t remember where it was.

  She closes her eyes and tries to recall a landmark of some kind, a sign or a water tower. There are so many cities in Ohio and so many of them begin with C. All she can really remember is that they had just left the rest stop where David bought the peanuts, but that’s of little help, since that stop was like every other rest stop on the highway, each of them laid out in the same configuration of snack bar, bathroom, and gift shop, all selling the same newspapers, gifts, and food. Even the people who work in them resemble each other slightly, like distant relations.

  Anne and David have stopped at every rest stop they’ve come to. David takes great pleasure, Anne can tell, in the sameness of the places; he walks right in and heads, without even a moment’s orientation, toward the bathroom, or when he gets coffee, he reaches around behind him, without looking, to the little islands that hold cream and sugar. Anne always goes to the bathroom, whether she needs to or not.

  —You’d better go now, David says at each stop, —you never know when you’ll get another chance, though she knows they’ll pull in to the next one down the road. In every bathroom she splashes water on her face, blots it off with toilet paper, and leans for a few moments against the cool tile walls, then goes to wait for David by the glass entryway to the rest stop, where she watches the steady flow of families. It is late August, and the families are rushing to accomplish their vacations before the summer ends; their faces show the strain of driving relentlessly across the country, only to return home by the same road, dazed and drained, a week later. They all look so familiar that Anne wonders if maybe some of them are the same, if some of these families might be following David’s pattern of stopping at every opportunity, regardless of need.

  It was at the last stop, or the one before, that David bought the peanuts; Anne looked up from the newspaper box by the doors, in the middle of an article she had started reading three or four stops earlier, and was surprised to see David actually buying something in the gift shop. Usually he only browsed, but this time he was handing the clerk money, and through the glass wall of the store his plain pleasant face was happy and a little flushed as he chatted with her.

  —Look, David said when he joined Anne. He held out a can with a bright yellow label and an inartistic drawing of something that looked both foreign and oddly familiar. Only after a moment did she realize it was a picture of a bowl of peanuts, heaped up in their shells; they were boiled, the label said, and preserved in brine. It was cracker food, food eaten by Kentuckians and Southerners. She looked up at David’s pleased, expectant face.

  —Boiled peanuts? she said.

  —I thought it would make a nice housewarming gift.

  —It’s not a new house, she said, handing the can back.

  —You know what I mean. A guest gift. Whatever they call it.

  —A hostess gift. She’s my sister. You don’t have to bring a gift.

  —Well, I’ve never met her. I should bring something.

  Anne could see that David was disappointed in her reaction, but she felt suddenly annoyed by it all—the picture, the peanuts, the kind of cheap little store that would sell such things.

  —Who would eat them? she said. —Who would eat boiled peanuts?

  —Th
ey’re not to eat, he said. —That’s not the point. He held up the can. —Look at them. He glanced unhappily at the picture on the label, then gazed around at the rest stop. After a moment he seemed to draw enthusiasm from the familiar glazed faces of children, the grim tight men. —It’s a gag, he said. —It’s like a gag gift.

  —Well, she said, turning away, —let’s go.

  She still doesn’t know what bothered her about the peanuts; it was just a small joke, but now the can sits on the seat between them, a bright reminder of this most recent failure. There is something pathetic about the jauntiness of the label, and the can rolls with the pitch of the car whenever David takes a sudden swerve to pass another station wagon full of tired parents and unhappy children.

  Anne wants to be sure to get her sister alone later and explain that she had nothing to do with the peanuts, that they were David’s idea. You know how men are, she’ll say, waving her hand, and Nancy will nod distractedly, leaving the peanuts on the counter until David and Anne are gone; then she will put them in a cabinet, where, over the years, they will gradually be pushed to the back, making way for cans and boxes of real food, until one day Nancy will come upon them as she cleans her cupboards and wonder what on earth possessed her to buy a can of boiled peanuts. She’ll blame it on her husband or decide one of her children must have begged her for them; by then she will have forgotten all about David, but Anne is determined to remember every detail. She wishes she could keep the peanuts, take them back home with her, carry them around. Cincinnati, she thinks, Cleveland, Columbus.

  The car jerks suddenly, and Anne opens her eyes to see David gazing anxiously at an exit ahead, but when he discerns that there is no rest area off the highway, he picks up speed again. Anne leans her head on her elbow and lets the wind whip her hair across her face. It’s been in the nineties all day, and even the wind that passes through the car is breathless and heavy. Her skin feels like a layer of plastic wrapped around her body, but David refuses to run his air conditioner; there’s something wrong with it, he says, and he doesn’t want to take the chance of overheating the car in this weather, but she suspects him of trying to cut costs, since this trip is, after all, for her, with nothing much in it for him other than the ride, something he calls her attention to every now and then.

  —You know, he’ll say, —this isn’t exactly how I would choose to spend this weekend. But then, after his point has been made, he looks happily back at the road ahead or the greenish fields to either side, pleased with what a good sport he is, how helpful he has been. The purpose of their trip is to pick up several pieces of furniture–a table, some chairs, a secretary–that Nancy has been keeping since their parents moved to a retirement center in Florida. Anne has no real need for the furniture–she already has too many things in her small apartment–but lately Nancy has referred to it more frequently in her letters, finally almost insisting that Anne come and retrieve it. The furniture has become a kind of theme in letters that have grown increasingly bland, empty of all but a kind of brittle newsiness, little facts about the house, her children, her husband Andy. Any break in the clutter of minutiae is bridged with cryptic remarks, oblique suggestions that things are not quite right, grim little homilies apropos of nothing.

  —Well, what goes around comes around, Nancy will write, but then it is back to the report cards, the lawn, a store clerk’s rudeness.

  Anne hasn’t seen Nancy for almost three years, and what limited sense Anne has of her life comes from her letters and the Christmas photographs of Andy, Nancy, and their three children. Anne can hardly keep the names and ages of the children straight, and they all look alike, with blond hair and serious, composed faces. They look like no one in Anne’s family, but neither do they resemble Andy, who is tall, with a sharp bitter face that grows more closed with each picture. Before she and David left, Anne found the most recent photograph in order to remember the faces and names of the children. In this picture, Nancy’s hair is tied back sloppily and she gives the impression of gazing off into space, though, like the others, she is looking stonily into the camera; her arms are wrapped around her sides, and her children squat in a little line in front of her. Nancy writes about them often, but every sentence seems punctuated by a heavy sigh: this one doesn’t sleep well in the summer, that one needs glasses or has to go to the doctor again, and they all need shoes all the time. Anne memorized the children’s names and ages and put the picture back in a drawer, but now all she can remember is that Jimmy is nine.

  —Hey, David says, but she ignores him and tries to recall the other two children’s names.

  —Hey, he says again, and she moves her head away from the window. Her skin feels puffy from the heat and wind.

  —What? he says. —Were you asleep? He glances at her, then back to the road, and she shakes her head.

  —You know, he says, —it’s kind of boring, just driving like this. This trip is a lot longer than I thought it would be.

  He looks down at the odometer and she wonders if he is keeping track of the mileage; she knows it would not occur to him to ask her to pay for the miles traveled, but it bothers her that he might be keeping track–that when he thinks back on this trip, he might remember it as the number of miles he put on his car for her.

  —It wouldn’t seem so long if we had air conditioning, she says as a truck pulls up beside them on the left. David steps on the gas, shooting ahead, then slides into the left lane, in front of the truck. He looks in the rearview mirror and smiles; it is a minor victory, but it restores his good mood and he settles back in his seat.

  This annoys Anne, this easy equanimity; she likes to think it betrays a lack of depth, and most of the time she feels secure in this perception, but sometimes, late at night when she wakes and he is sleeping, she is struck by the uneasy thought that perhaps it is she who is missing something, that her impatience with David is a failure of imagination on her part. She tries now to watch him surreptitiously, but he glances over and offers an uncomplicated smile, his mild resentment already forgotten. She looks away. His friendly mood won’t stop her, she tells herself; it is over, and she is going to end it. David presses on the gas, and they surge forward into a future apart, a future she saw as far back as Columbus, perhaps even Cincinnati. In the bright light of such a future, she can see that there is something sweet about David, something nearly likeable; even the peanuts provoke a slight fondness in her, and she smiles and leans her head back to plan the end of their affair.

  By the time they are approaching Marion, where Nancy lives, Anne has gone over their breakup so many times–what she will say, how she will say it, how David will look, and how she will comfort him–that she feels pleased and settled, as though something has already been agreed upon between them, and their years together, which have been unexciting and untroubled, end in a gloriously friendly burst of sympathy. Anne pulls the visor down to look in the mirror, but nothing is changed, she is still the same: her hair, which she wore up to keep neat, looks messy and dirty, and the shirt she thought would travel well is wet and rumpled. She wonders how she will look to her sister and to three children who have not seen her since they were toddlers. Oh, she will say to each of them, you’ve gotten so tall. She practices a smile to go along with this, the mild smile of an aunt, with her eyebrows raised, but in the mirror it looks fake and comical, so she lowers her brows, but the effect is slightly demonic.

  —What are you doing? David asks. —Did you get something in your eye?

  Anne pushes the visor up. —Do you think we could have some air conditioning for the rest of the drive? she says.

  David takes a quick look at the dashboard panel. —I don’t think so, he says. —I don’t want to put too much stress on the engine. What if it overheats? We’d be stuck in the middle of nowhere. He glances in the rearview mirror. —After all, he says, and looks at her earnestly, —this isn’t exactly a pleasure trip for me, you know.

  She forces a smile; it is moments like these, she tells herself, that
are forcing her to leave him, small moments that in themselves are only remotely irritating, but that all together add up to something large and impossible. Soon they won’t be lovers anymore, she reminds herself; in fact, since Cincinnati–and she is nearly certain it was Cincinnati–it is almost as if they are already no longer lovers. She closes her eyes, and until he asks her for directions, she imagines her life without him. In a perfect quiet room, she will sit by the window, and not once will he wander by and ask her what she is doing, or sit down on the couch opposite her and smile, wondering what they will do next. These are small things, she knows that, but even so, when she thinks of a life without him, the days and weeks seem to stretch out like a big clean icy block of time, undisturbed by any sound or voice or presence other than her own.

  When they arrive in Marion, David looks distastefully around at the stretch of strip malls and fast-food places on the edge of town; Anne was born here, and lived here until she left for college. She has always hated it, but it seems worse even than she remembers, a huge complicated garden of shiny glass and metal huts.

  —You were born here? David asks. —No wonder you never want to come back.

  He is from Oregon, and his tone, when he speaks of it to Anne, is both wistful and patronizing, as if anyone from the Midwest could never quite understand the magic of such a place. Although Anne herself feels oppressed by the dozens of unnecessary restaurants, the stacks of light-colored brick apartment buildings with tiny terraces stuck to the sides, the little square gas station/food marts evenly spaced a block apart on each corner, she feels she must defend it from him before he begins to compare it to Portland.

  —It’s not so bad. The people are very down-to-earth, she says, although in fact she remembers them as generally not very good-tempered. She moved away as soon as she could, and she has always been surprised at Nancy’s decision to settle here.