“Hi.” She laughed for no reason, a nervous laugh, a laugh that might’ve said, Fancy seeing you here, though that line would have been his.
“How are you?” they both asked, then laughed, shrugged.
“I live here now,” she said. “Just moved back.”
“Oh, really?” Tommy had heard she was back; sometimes he thought he had felt she was back, that some weird current had traveled from her house to his. So many people had mentioned that she was coming back that now he couldn’t remember who had gotten to him first. “When did you come back?” He watched her as she gave him all the information he already knew: two weeks ago, moved into that wonderful old Queen Anne down on the corner of Linden and Fourth Avenue. He had grown up minutes from that house, had passed it walking to and from school his whole life.
“You liked that house in high school,” he said. “I had forgotten until now.” She looked away, and he knew what she was thinking. She was thinking that it was impossible for him to have forgotten such a thing; she was thinking of all the nights that they had walked past that house and in their senior year driven past it on the way to Simmon’s Beach, the only small stretch of the river with a real sandy shore and water tame enough for swimming. It was a place they had been warned about as children; every summer there was at least one drowning. With the building of the interstate, it was rumored to be a good spot for body dumping. Somebody could kill somebody in Washington before breakfast, dump him in the river at lunchtime, and be in Florida in time for cocktails. For teenagers, all that made the spot about as good as driving over to Wilmington to see the Maco Light, from the old ghost story about a man who searches nightly for his lost head. It was scary and exciting; it gave a reason for the high anxiety and rapid heartbeat that was tied to the question about whether or not you’d try to get in somebody’s pants, and if you did try, then whether or not she’d respond.
One night Tommy had stripped down behind a bush and then dashed into the freezing dark water while Sarah stood on the bank and watched. “It feels great,” he called out to her, struggling to keep his teeth from chattering. He swam out to the center and beckoned to her while treading water. The sky was cloudy, no moonlight. “I couldn’t see you if I even tried!”
“What if somebody comes?”
“You mean like somebody coming to dump a dead body?”
“Stop it, Tommy.” She was at the edge of the water, her big cloth purse abandoned up on the mossy bank where they had left a blanket and his cigarettes.
“Well, if you’re out here with me, we’ll swim right on to the other side and the bushes are so thick there they’d never see us.” He consciously slicked his hair straight back the way she had once, in broad daylight, told him she liked it. She had said she liked seeing every tiny bit of his face. “But if you’re way over there by yourself . . .” He let his voice trail off.
“Tommy? What?” she called out and he could hear the sudden fear mounting in her voice. “Tommy? Keep talking to me.”
“Well, you know, like if a car were to suddenly pull up and say start dragging a body . . .” He watched while she ran off behind the big bush he’d used earlier. “I’ll get you, TomCat!” she called. “I swear I will.”
“Promises, promises.” He waited, and then there was a flash of light and a splash as she made her way toward him. She was an exceptionally strong swimmer, her arms and legs as lean and almost as muscular as his. He reached out and grabbed her arm, pulled her over close, his legs treading hard and rhythmically, to keep himself upright while he wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her in close. With each kiss they sank, and when he opened his eyes there was pitch blackness like at the planetarium when their science teacher had told them to hold their hands in front of their faces. Nothing. Space, void, emptiness. Those sensations scared him. Always had. But there in the water, her mouth on his as they surfaced and sputtered, he was not afraid.
That was the first night they made love, and it happened so easily there in the water—her legs wrapped around his hips, his toes digging into the slick muddy bottom to anchor them both—that he later wondered if it had in fact happened. It was their spot, their way. Let’s go to the river meant much more to them and yet they could say it openly to one another across the high school cafeteria or in the parking lot. When it got too cold to go into the dark brown water, they stayed on the bank or in the car. “Careful, careful,” she would often say, arching her back and easing out from under him just before he came; then he could sleep like he had never in his life been able to. For the first time he had found in a person what he got from the ocean: she was a welcoming escape, and there was total comfort and safety. He could simply close his eyes and drift, disappear.
HE LOOKED UP suddenly with her question. “Is your car being fixed, too?”
“No, I just needed to clean the windows.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Car trouble?”
“Oil change.” She threw a thumb over her shoulder, and he assumed it was in reference to the BMW parked there and not the rust-eaten Chevrolet truck. “He said it would only take a half an hour, but he hasn’t even started.”
“He’s slow.” Tommy laughed. “Always has been. Remember how people used to blow the horn?”
She laughed with him, her arms crossed over her chest.
“Remember how Jones Jameson used to blow the horn when the poor guy had his head under the hood?”
“Jones Jameson, now there’s a name I’ve tried to avoid.”
“He went to college with you, didn’t he?” Tommy was stunned by the accusing tone of his words, the surfacing of the old anger he had felt when all those people packed up their footlockers and moved away.
“Yeah, my husband saw him more than I did.” She seemed to mumble that word, husband, and she looked back over her shoulder at her car, then at her watch. “We’ve heard him on the radio, of course.”
“He’s as much of an asshole as ever.” Tommy breathed in, tried hard to sound nonchalant. “So does your husband have a name?” As hard as he tried, the words seemed to stick and sound forced. Of course he knew all there was to know: Mr. and Mrs. David Hennesey request the pleasure of your presence at the marriage of their daughter, Sarah Elizabeth, to Mr. Charles William McCallister III, blah blah blah.
Tom went to the beach that day; he waited until long after the Presbyterian parking lot had filled and then emptied, until the country club parking lot had filled and then emptied to a spray of rice and the clanking of tin cans. The newspaper said: Mr. Charles William (Mack) McCallister III, graduate of UNC like the bride, native of Durham, where the two would make their home, while “Mack,” good old Big Mack went to Duke Law School, alma mater of Richard Nixon. How could she have thought that Tom would want to come to her wedding. Was she feeling sorry for him? Why hadn’t she felt sorry for him that weekend her freshman year when he went up to see her and all she could talk about was sorority rush and football games? Yeah, her husband had known Jones Jameson all right. Jones was in the wedding; they were in the same fraternity. Maybe Sarah’s husband had also liked to fuck girls who said they didn’t want to be fucked but of course really did, according to Jones Jameson. That morning Jones Jameson had told his radio listeners what the perfect woman looks like: three feet tall, no teeth, and a flat head so you can rest a beer on top. Surely people didn’t understand what he meant or somebody would go after him. Tommy hated him and right then he let his hate spill over to Sarah’s husband—hate by association.
“Mack,” she said. “His name is Mack. You know I . . .” Her voice trailed off, and when he asked her “What,” she said that she forgot. Forgot? He wanted to scream at her to finish the fucking sentence, complete one fucking thought during this lifetime, please. You know I’m sorry that I ended everything so fast, Tommy. You know I invited you to the wedding, Tommy, so I know that you know what my husband’s name is. You know I get so tired of waiting in gas stations. You know I wish the sun would come out. You know I nev
er stopped loving you, TomCat. You know I sometimes still fall asleep pretending that you’re deep inside of me.
The memory that finds him most often is a night before graduation when she was so aggressive, desperate to tell him exactly how she felt, desperate to have him. When he picked her up that night, her parents’ living room was cluttered with graduation gifts, sheets and towels and a little two-burner stove. Sarah’s parents greeted him politely, but now there was this air of relief that she would soon be leaving, that he would no longer be part of their daughter’s life. Sarah, picking up on the unspoken messages being sent, reached and took his hand, squeezed it, one, two, three. Her parents were going to a dinner party, and Tommy and Sarah were going to the movies, or so they said.
“What movie?” her mother asked while adjusting a little rhinestone butterfly pin up on her shoulder, like it had just lit there.
“Rocky.”
“Didn’t you already see that?”
“Yeah.” Sarah shrugged. “But we’re going with some other people. Nothing else is on.”
They walked out to Tommy’s car, his mother’s Impala, and drove away as her parents were leaving. “Good thing Rocky is easy to discuss without having ever seen it.” She reached over and put her hand on his thigh, pulled herself closer. “I don’t want to go to the river tonight.”
“You don’t?” He froze, preparing for some pronouncement. This is it, the breakup, the I-think-we-should-date-other-people speech.
“Nah, let’s go back to my house,” she whispered in his ear. “I’ll show you my sketchings.”
“Or etchings.”
“Whatever.” They parked his car two blocks away at an accounting office and walked back to her house. It was dusk and they went through the downstairs, then up to her room without turning on any lights. He had seen her room once before. It was the typical girl room. White furniture and canopy bed, pink frilly spread and pastel-colored quilt that she had had since birth. She went to her closet and within minutes stepped out in underwear he hadn’t seen before: black and lacy, purchased just for you, she said.
He kept thinking he heard things, car doors, her father’s whistling; he felt the eyes of all the stuffed toys and Barbie dolls that lined the shelves. Her parents could so easily forget something, return, walk in. His chest was pounding and even though she was licking around his ear, her hands fumbling with his zipper, he could not respond. His reluctance made her work that much harder, saying things she had never said, teasing him in ways that she had never done.
“What have you been reading, Sarah?” he whispered, but by then she had pushed his pants down and was rubbing against him, pulling him onto the pink silky surface. She straddled his stomach and leaned forward, and he saw her, the Sarah he knew pretending to be someone else, wanting to be someone else.
“Are you mad at me?” he had asked, pushing her up so that he could see her eyes.
“Only about you,” she said. “I am crazy mad about you.” And he caved in, gave himself over to this plan of hers, the grown-up charade. It was the best it had ever been, but then he was worried about her room, the bedspread, the smell of their bodies, no condom. He tried to pull out but she dug in with her knees and pressed harder, their hip bones grinding. It was like being in the middle of the river and unable to touch bottom; a rhythmic treading and gasping and then complete immersion. “I didn’t get out,” he whispered, and he felt her mouth breathe a weak “I know” into his cheek.
“IT MIGHT BE an hour or so,” Doug Taylor called out from his musty garage. His hands were stained a deep brown from motor oil. “Had to get a tire change taken care of.”
“Oh, dear,” Sarah said.
“I could give you a lift home,” Tommy said, and she looked up.
“Yeah? That would be great.”
“Hop in.” He opened the cab door, and she climbed up. He felt himself looking around as he circled the truck to his side. What would Jones Jameson, for example, make of this scene? Or her mother? Her husband? He got in and closed the door, brushed the dog hair from the edge of her seat. “I hope nobody thinks this is a rendezvous,” he said and turned the ignition.
“So who cares?” She laughed and then fell silent. When he pulled into her driveway and stopped, no other car there, she turned in the seat and leaned toward him. “I know. Let’s ride around. Give me the tour the way you used to. Show me what’s new or different.”
“Yeah?” He glanced up at her front porch all littered with moving boxes.
“Yeah! I’m tired of unpacking. I’ve been alone all day long.”
“Where’s . . .” He tried to say “Mack” but couldn’t. “Where’s your husband? Where’s June?”
“Work and visiting the boyfriend, who sounds like a jerk.”
“Which one’s doing which?”
“You’re the same old TomCat,” she said, reached over and patted his thigh. He had not been this scared since they lay there in her childhood room, his underwear thrown and hanging over the head of a bear he had won for her at Ocean Drive.
“No, no, I’m not the same.”
She got quiet, and he found himself able to look at her without blinking, able to return this stare she had fixed on him immediately. She looked a little older, around the eyes maybe; she looked tired.
“You look the same to me,” she said. “Please, Tommy. Be the same. I’ll be your best friend.” The last time she had said that to him was when he went up to visit her in college and she wanted him to go to a dorm party where he was the only person not wearing Top-Siders and long khaki shorts. “Please. Please let me make things up to you.”
He sat, hand on the gear but not shifting. What in the hell did she mean by that?
“You look surprised.”
“I am.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re different, you know. You’re married.” He looked at himself in the rearview mirror. Reality check.
“We’re still friends aren’t we, Tommy?”
“It’s been twenty years.”
“So? Are you saying you don’t want to be friends?” She looked at him then, eyes tearful. What had happened there in her perfect little cottage that now after all these years made her want him back in her life? Was she cracking up?
“Sarah,” the sound of her name was so familiar in his mind yet it had been years since he had actually said it. “Think about where I am in all of this.”
“Yes?” She sat and then a knowing look came to her and with it she promptly looked away. “Oh, of course, there’s somebody in your life, and you don’t want to botch things up.”
“No.” He shook his head and without thinking reached over and grabbed her arm, squeezed with each syllable. “There’s someone in your life.” He stopped just short of the presumption. It was so easy to turn such a line on someone. He had once been asked on a date only to be told upon declining, “Well, I only asked you to go for coffee. I wasn’t proposing. Who do you think you are?” Now he stopped and waited for her to manipulate his meaning.
“I have someone, and you don’t want to botch that up. Is that it?” She put her hand on his and squeezed back. “Mack knows all about you and how important you were to me.”
“He knows all about me?” He pulled his hand out from under hers and played with the key chain that hung from the ignition, a silver dog whistle, remains of his last brief relationship, which had ended almost two years ago. And how important I was?
“Well not all about you,” she said and squeezed his hand. “Really, Tommy, I need to ride around, take in the sights.” She laughed. “Then you take me back to the Exxon and that’s it, I’ll never force you to take me for a ride again.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said and he looked straight ahead as his ears and neck burned. He put the truck in reverse and backed down the drive. What he really wanted to say was “Let’s go to the river.” What he really wanted to say was, Please just let me drown.
GROUNDHOG DAY 1985
; Dear Wayward One,
It’s our anniversary tonight. Twenty years since we had our own little ceremony out at the Holiday Inn on the highway. My husband always asks me why I love Holiday Inns so much. He recently tried to get me to stay in like a Marriott or something really swank when we went down to Georgia for a little holiday. Nope. Holiday Inn for me. He thinks I’m thrifty—imagine that! Oh no, love, it’s the plain dull furniture, the same arrangement of everything bolted down, the same taste of coffee that he brought back to the room in a styrofoam cup, that YOU brought back to the room in a styrofoam cup that next morning. “To my make-believe wife,” you said and leaned down and kissed me. My husband thought I was visiting my childhood friend and of course we did do that! In those days I just couldn’t lie, not like I’ve learned to do lately. Now I am a professional liar. Watch out because you can’t believe a word I say. I mean, maybe you think I’ll tell you the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help me God because you are dead but honey, dead don’t count. The truth is that I am just as drunk as I can be. I am as drunk as I got that time I wasted all of our screwing time throwing up there in a rented lavatory that smelled like old piss. Oh dear, am I shocking you dead man? Am I making you feel bad? I can’t imagine it feels as bad as being without a head. HA! I can’t imagine it feels as bad as being the one left behind. I didn’t mean for this to go this way. You see the truth is that my husband and I just got back from the most wonderful dinner out. We drove to the beach. We’re AT the beach in a nice hotel and he has just fallen asleep after some of the best lovemaking I have done in my life. Eat your old decayed heart out! It’s so convenient that we’re here, because you see I don’t have nearly so far to go to mail your little old shitty letter. I guess you wonder why I always go to that same old box. Well, first of all, it gives me a reason to drive down here and hear the waves and second, it is the closest box to where you croaked. SO THERE! If you are some ghost haunting your last spot, then this is as close as I can get to you unless of course I walk down to the point and go up into your room there. The house is disappearing you know. With every high tide, with every high wind, a little bit more is gone. Soon there will be nothing, no place for me to go and stand, should I ever get up the nerve, and no place for you to stand in some foggy stupid form, you stupid ass of a selfish man. Why weren’t you like my husband, my real husband? What’s funniest about that night all those years ago is how we were planning to keep meeting, to take that same trip forever. I did call my husband more than I probably should’ve. I was so nervous. You, you weren’t nervous in the least. You put that styrofoam cup up to my lips and you said: For better or worse, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, keep your private stock unto me till death do we part. Well, we parted all right. And I hope you’re jealous in your old dead state. I do. I do. I do.
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