Sophie thought if he would just take the Special and kill a girlfriend, someone outside the family, that act would make them all safe.
“You’re just too tenderhearted,” said her father.
“Having a daughter has been difficult for your father,” explained her mother. She laughed her nervous, magnetic laugh. “It makes it so difficult for him to handle, having a daughter.” Her earrings were swinging wildly on her chest. She spoke as if she couldn’t hear herself, for very calmly she said, “You do know that I punish myself for his sins.”
At that, her father’s lower lids rode up; he gave them a very hard masculine squint.
“Don’t say good-bye,” he said. “Because I’m superstitious. It’s always dangerous to say good-bye.”
“Be careful in New York,” he said. “A lot of men like actresses, even beginners.”
They held hands and started to leave, “to make it easier for you to go.” She left them, wordless, in a funny run because of the fit of her shoes. She was not sure she could keep up, passing passengers at this speed on a waxed corridor. Her heart was swimming; temporarily, she hurt herself gripping her shoes on with her toes.
peripheral vision
We’re from the city; we’ve been out here for about a year. We felt we were ready for a change, that out here in the woods we could find what needed to change about us.
This morning, I awakened in the dark and found my husband lying beside me snoring without being asleep. He does that when he’s sure it’s going to be a rough day. While I was brushing the wrinkles of sleep out of my hair, William explained what his day would be. He’s a lawyer so there’s lots of trouble and tight places he’ll be in today. I listened with my jaw stapled shut, pretending to understand the seriousness. I acted mature. I should—I’m thirty.
Last year, on my birthday, I waited for William to wake up. The minute he rolled from his sheet I said, “I made it! Turn around, look at me. I’m in my birthday suit. I’m thirty.” He did look at me, his eyes tiny. “Nope,” he said, “you still can’t count, you’re twenty-nine.” So we waited a year to celebrate: a rare steak cut into thirds to share with our son Ian.
The clock slaps over its digital cube and William must leave quickly for the bus to the city. He is not a sure driver. When I’m alone, I lock the bathroom door and get into the shower. Lather lifts; I shiver inside it, and feel too slick.
Then William is back, intruding with a bang on the door. It swings open under the hock of his hand. “No big deal,” I mumble. In our house the doors are weak because we are forever locking ourselves on the wrong side. An unexpected snap of a lock, no safety keys, so we take down the whole frame to get out or in. We’ve worn out all the locks; we tear our house apart to get out.
The humidity on the bathroom floor makes William skid. He almost loses his balance. “Come out of there,” he shouts. “I’m off the drive and stuck.” His arms go up in the air, hopeless, nothing to hold onto. “Hurry, you’ve got to get me out of the yard, I can’t be late. I can’t let that bus get away from me.” Already, he’s wiping his shoes on the bathmat, leaving.
“I’m coming,” I say. But he’s already gone. No one to catch my irritation. I wring the Hot and Cold knobs off together, slap back into the dark bedroom, scrubbing with a towel, and begin putting on my clothes, so angry that they snag on me. I quietly cuss him while deciding to wear his big, heavy sweater for warmth. I mean to look in the mirror, but he calls and I’m already out of the room. He has the power to make me appear and disappear. I give him the power, don’t I?
Toes thump against the steep stairs. I sail my voice back up towards Ian’s door. “Your dad’s in a pickle. I’ll drive him to the bus and be back before you know you’re awake. Promise. Don’t rush, but if you get into your clothes for school, try to match,” I add as I slide into my cold garden shoes that wait at the door. Our cat springs out the door beside me.
The wind from the slope of the yard gathers my hair and pulls it. William has missed the angle of our drive. He does not back up well, since he only uses mirrors. He won’t look behind. He says, of late, it hurts to turn his head. He’s afraid he will hear something pop. So he’s backed himself into our soft yard.
My finger sticks briefly to my fingerprint on the car’s chrome. I throw my pocketbook on the floor. Inside the car, the heater is set on high. Fleas of heat jump up from my skin. Then I realize I’m still soaped and never rinsed properly, merely dried.
I bounce the driver’s seat in position and tip mirrors. William says I have to get that look off my face and hurry because I can drive faster than he. He holds tightly to the thermos of coffee that he will sip on the bus all the way to the city.
“I wish you’d do it yourself,” I say. “You’re brilliant at the office, but will you ever be able to get places by yourself? Even when you drive, I have to go with you half the time to hold your cigarette for you. And keep sucking on it so it won’t go out.” Now I am shouting.
My son, stranded in the cold on the redwood deck, and my husband with his hot thermos beside me are shouting to calm me, “Watch it, Mom. Easy, Caroline. Easy. Easy.”
I feel scared of this temporary dislike for William which, it occurs to me, may not be temporary. I am in reverse, flying backwards into the stray gravel and last blooms of chickweed, catchflys, and daisies. And then we are up on the road, the tires hollering. I hear our nearest neighbor Gary’s dog. She is howling. I have awakened her and hurt her ears.
William’s hair is mussed up. It is soft and thinning and the brown of a soft chair. “You’re wearing me out,” he says. More hair seems to be missing this morning.
“Why can’t you ever do it by yourself?” I say.
His smile crowds into the corner of his mouth. “I can’t. That’s what marriage is. Doing it together.”
Wearing deep smiles, we pretend our argument isn’t real. We are terrifying of late, what we say. We are too much for each other. An accumulation of ten years of marriage has hit.
Down the road—I am making excellent time—he takes an early taste of his coffee. “You can’t go out of your way for anybody,” he says, as I swerve to avoid a small spot of cold-looking animal guts already spilled on the road. “It’s too much to ask you to shorten your shower.”
He’s not letting up. Harnessed at the wheel, I cannot maneuver even my eyes that could sting him like a nettle so that he’d throb inside all day. He is outtalking me. I feel him sliding past in the race to a finish we don’t know. Instead of using words, I strike out with my small piano-playing hands and nails. I lash blindside and catch him on his watch; it is made of gold and always set for five minutes early.
“Look what you did,” he says, amazed at my fury. I see there is blood on the side of his watch. The stem has stuck him. A short rip of bright red. “You never hit me before.” He touches his wound and pats his penis in his pants. “I feel awful, look what you did.” He presses a Kleenex to his wound.
“You ought to feel it from my side,” I say. I have tears on my breath. “I’m the one who did it, so I feel worse.”
My husband sits smug in the front seat. “We must make it,” he mutters. He means the commuter bus to the city. The heat from the car bubbles in my nose. I need to go back to bed and start again.
Too late he says, “Sorry. You know I can’t drive myself.” He makes it sound practical.
Something new has been introduced. I worry with it. What was my mistake, an impulse, can stick now as my method. It will be easy to reach for this again as a solution. I feel I have grown a new ugly part of me.
“So why did you move out here where you can’t get a taxi?” I start to laugh because it is funny, but my sucked-in laugh goes down the wrong way.
“You wanted to move here, too,” he says. “And you knew I couldn’t drive—still, you wanted to move to the country with me. I’m trying to fix your life,” my husband says. “To help you have something in the end, not just pieces. I want you to have the right dreams,” he
says.
Down the hill before the junior high school parking lot we catch the red light and wait and can’t see around the corner where the bus may be idling with its lights on. Or has it already gone and left him with me for the day? I turn the car onto the bus’s road. It’s there.
“Let’s just stop arguing,” he says and sighs.
I’m already swinging the stick shift into Park. I’m not mad at him anymore. He’s made me mad at me. I think that’s how he always wins the race.
He and I get out at the same time. I slam my door first. He slams second. The reflections in the car’s window shrug. He comes to me with his chest barreled. I have to step back. I think he does that to take possession of me. But he extends his left hand and offers to help. He is so friendly that it is exasperating. He’s said he loves me and that I’m the best thing in his life, and I won’t answer.
I’m still on my seesaw of anger. We stand in the current of diesel. I think I can taste the bus. It’s like a cold metal spoon in my mouth.
He goes back to his side and pokes down the button on the car door, and so do I on mine—a duel of buttons. His smile bobs. “Caroline.” He spreads my name out. “Why did you lock it? You have to take my car to get back home. Just don’t forget you have to pick me up tonight.”
“Stop telling me what to do,” I say. “Can’t you ask me please?”
He looks at the bus, his watch, and groans at his wound.
“How would you get home without taking my car? I would ask a stranger to say please. We’re closer than that. But okay—please meet my bus tonight. Please take my car home with you since you don’t have another way. But you’re on your own. Figure out how to take this car and leave one to meet my bus tonight. What else were you going to be buzzing around with today?”
My garden, I think, but I don’t answer him.
William chooses to trot to the bus. How can he love himself so much when I’m hating him?
In the bus there’s a club of six commuting husbands from this stop. Larry, the driver, has occasional mild but exciting heart attacks or stoppages, or he overflows his valves, and the club covers up for him so he can make it to retirement. They grab the emergency brake and steer to the side and smoke and wait while he pants over the wheel.
Larry opens the bus doors to enfold my husband, who steps up from the thin layer of parking lot sand and debris.
Once the bus doors suction closed, I smile obscenely toward the bus and the husbands watch me through the tinted, weather-tight glass. One waves. I’m stuck on watching William and his thermos shamble down the aisle. I call out, “Sometimes I think I’m married to your mother. You act just like her. That old slue-footed, skinny-legged, mangy mammal. Mammal, mammal, mammal. You clone! I hate what she did to you—bullied you and made fun of you. But now you’re doing it to me! I wish she’d die, why doesn’t she just die? I know. I forgot. She did die. She died and it didn’t make me feel better.” I think of the feel of William’s skin in bed. He’s so soft to have come from such a rough family.
Larry with the skipping heart pops the bus doors. William pokes his voice out in the cold. “They think you’re trying to tell me something.”
“I am.”
We part for the day, me in a lope, him stubbing his fingers against the bus door closing on schedule, telling me that I forgot to take his car. I punish him and leave on foot. I leave the damn car and go in one side of the school to find a phone and call somebody to come get me. There are no phones. I go out the other side, smelling wet weeds from the Boro lake coming around my back on a wind. The cold ends of my hair touch my throat and I tighten a little into the brown fuzz of William’s sweater, soft as his hair. Next I have to get a ride up the mountain, and I’m shy. Trying to get back at William, I have made the wrong choice for myself.
I walk the worn-out center line of 23 North. I clench my teeth whenever possible. Why? Because of the irreconcilable differences in me. Politely, I step over into the other lane for a few cars to pass. We’re right at the end of the state; traffic is thin. It is not going my way. I hold my thumb out from me, ashamed, and look the other way. The locals will stop for anyone. They’re not rushing—they’re already where they’re going.
It is then that Roy Dee blows a funny horn at me and stops. He’s the one who cuts our yard in the summer. After the first day of fall he doesn’t do anything for a living. Instead of yards, he circles town looking for all he missed summers. I have to sit on my feet because he never cleans out his truck. He doesn’t know how to read or write. I always pay him in cash. When he called about the job of our yard, I told him I’d put a sign for him on the big tree to show where we were. He laughed at that. Then I realized my sign could say “Free Kittens” and he’d stop. That’s a funny way to get around, pulling in at any sign.
Scenery wiggles through his old truck windows. The motor is loud. Finally, we’ve climbed the hill and we’re crawling along the ridge that takes me home. His foot sits on the brake when he sees my yard. He runs his finger toward the spot we made this morning.
“Them’s ruts,” he says. “How you get ’em? They’re gonna set in the frost. They gonna freeze and set. It’s gonna be hard to mow over them big wrinkles. Just when I got your yard sweet. Don’t you care about nothing?” He never smiles because he’s missing his teeth.
“I won’t let them stay.” I do care, I assure myself. “I’ll dig them up and pat them down right.” I thank Roy Dee. My flat shoes slap my feet bottoms when I jump down from the door rim of his truck onto my gravel.
Up on the deck, which snaps and pops at each step, I realize I’ve walked down an empty driveway. My car for me to use and get back at William is not here. I think back to last night; I drove through such thin blue mountain air, coasting along the bottom of a bowl of earth, the car muttering under me, to leave it for the mechanic.
No mechanic ever knows what’s wrong with a car till it won’t go; he told me that. I told him I need it fixed before it breaks down. He has assured me that he can’t help me, but today, when I need the car, he is trying.
I decide to give up and wonder how to do it. Through the glass storm door, cartoon colors shine out at me. My son’s before-school cartoons. With one foot pointed into the room, I lean on the kitchen wallpaper and watch all I can stand. Wile E. Coyote is being chased until he is caught under a truck. He is paper flat, merely an edge. Other cartoon characters are pumping him up with an air pump. “Ian, I warn you, in real life you can’t fill people back up like that,” I say.
Ian, with his small friendly face, eyes chipped-blue, rests his chin on a mug of Granola and complains, “This takes too long to eat, it makes my mouth tired but I do it for you. Oh hey, Mom, a minute ago the phone rang and the tape answered it.”
The red flag is up. I rewind and listen. I’ve got a message I can’t quite understand. The tape is too big for the spinner; it’s stretched with our erasing messages. As best as I can figure out, I need to see the Boro Police about our car in the parking lot. I’ve left it locked and the motor running.
It must be true. I have no keys in my jeans pocket. I look frantically up the drive; nothing glitters on it. But I can see Gary out the window, the washing machine salesman, his key ring shining on his belt. Gary’s house is through the trees; the drive touches ours. He is playing on his drive with the dog. He throws a scuffed Frisbee and runs to get it and then throws it again to see if the dog wants it. Across the yard I go. “Gary,” I say, “I have a problem.”
“Okay,” he says. He and the dog come down toward me. His hair, close-cut, looks like down.
“I got a call, Gary. I need to get downtown. I don’t have my car today.” His dog, Badger, paws around me.
“Sure,” he says. “Take my wife’s car. She’s still asleep.” Badger rolls her eyes up at Gary and then whirls a small gravel storm.
“You woke the dog this morning,” he says. Gary is a nice serious person. I often catch him watching people. William asked Roy Dee to leave a “buffer z
one” between our houses, but the undergrowth is thin. He can still see us.
“My wife’s afraid you and William will have an accident one day.”
“No. No,” I say. “We just sound like an accident. We’re both sorry for making noise.” I’m worried. Has he seen us be awful? The times when William grabbed hold of me and got lost in one of his tantrums, was Gary watching?
“My wife believes if one day I had to I could overpower him.”
“No, no,” I say. My pulse jumps into my ear. Maybe the car is running out of gas.
“Just put the car back in the garage,” he says. “She stays up late with me till I go to sleep. I have trouble cause I keep adding things up in my head, being a salesman and all.”
He married a big girl—his childhood sweetheart. She doesn’t like to go outside. She thinks she’s fat. She doesn’t have enough confidence to be a friend. She stays inside repainting the walls. I swear they are painted the same colors as her dresses so you won’t notice how large she is. But I’ve seen her mouth wet in the corners from Gary’s kisses. There’s love there, both sides.
He comes into the house with me, and the dog trots on the porch. At the junk drawer, I feel for my spare and can’t find it because I’m thinking how many miles a gallon a car gets when it’s standing still.
Instead of coffee, I take a drink of tap water. I can taste the iron in it.
Gary gets Ian’s quick nervous smile. Badger gets all the attention. As I walk Ian up the drive to his school stop, Ian is patting my back the way I did his when he was a baby.
Gary brings the car up. Badger shuffles the Frisbee with her nose.
The car is light blue. I get into it carefully.
“Hold forward,” says Gary, “so I can fit the seat belt to you.”
He thumbs down a lever and I waggle forward. Then I hold my hair up off my neck while he straps the shoulder harness. I hold my stomach in while he adjusts the lap belt.
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