Women Drinking Benedictine

by Sharon Dilworth

  “Are you afraid?” her husband asked. “Do you think those people are going to harm us?” They had recently moved from Detroit, and Phil wanted her to feel safe in their new home. He wrapped his arms around her waist and kissed her gently on the top of her head.

  “No,” Janeene said and believed this to be true. She simply wondered who they were, where they had come from, and why they were hiding in Marquette. She tried to talk to her neighbors the few times she saw them, but they were rarely out. Mostly she relied on her mailman. He was the one who told her how the boat had sunk moments after landing. Janeene invited him in for coffee, hoping to learn more about these strangers. Instead he began confusing things. One day he told her that Tori Anderson had seen some of the boat people in the grocery store buying large quantities of meat and dairy products. The manager of the IGA found forty-seven dollars in Canadian bills in the cash drawer, but neither cashier remembered or would admit to taking the money. Later when Janeene asked the mailman what time Tori had seen them, he looked startled and told her he had no idea what she was talking about. She knew he slipped whiskey into his coffee mug when he thought she wasn’t looking, and after he had forgotten what he told her for too many days, she decided it was best to stop asking him in. She didn’t want to worry about him getting drunk and walking down the narrow sidewalk paths. She worried he would fall. He could lie hidden behind the waist-high snowbanks for weeks before anyone found him.

  Phil was amused by her fascination with the town gossip. He was the kind of man who believed he could protect his wife from anything. He took pride in their marriage and considered their relationship different from and better than anyone else’s.

  “It’s us against the world,” he would tell Janeene when something upset her. “We’ve got to stick together.” Phil’s assurances always sounded like warnings, and she stopped telling him when she had had a bad day. Coming home from dinner parties or nights out with friends, Phil would discuss the things that were wrong with each person they had been with. “Carl’s too concerned with making money to pay any attention to his marriage. Denise is too wrapped up in Carl’s life to see that she is wasting her own.” Janeene understood what Phil was talking about, but also knew she would not have noticed these things on her own.

  They had decided to move north the previous year when Phil’s mother died. An only child, Phil inherited money from his father’s dry-cleaning business, which had expanded into five stores in the northern suburbs of Detroit. The interest on the inheritance was enough to support them, and without the need to work, there was no reason to stay in Detroit. In September they rented their two-bedroom condominium and moved into his family’s vacation home in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

  Phil thought it was the perfect time to start a family. They had been married six years—their love was obviously secure—and now they had money and time to devote to children. Phil had been subscribing to the Marquette newspaper for a year and told Janeene that it was one of the safest cities in the world. There was some crime—teenagers shoplifting at the mall, cars stolen from the deer camps—but only one murder had been reported in two years. Phil studied the case carefully. A twenty-two-year-old man had been found in Presque Isle State Park. The police told the newspapers that someone from the iron-ore ships had robbed and killed the young man. That rumor didn’t last. The hospital in town was the largest employer, and word got out that the man had been gutted. The victim was a homosexual, and the people of Marquette, if not the police, were certain that some kind of homophobic local had committed the murder. They did not believe the crime was as random as the police insisted. Phil, used to the crime rate in Detroit, did not consider this incident something that could change his mind about raising his family in Marquette.

  “Gutted?” Janeene read the article after Phil told her about the case. “What does that mean?”

  “Like you’d do to a deer,” Phil explained. He ran his hand up her stomach to her throat and splayed his fingers across her cheekbone. “The guy’s insides were taken out.”

  Janeene asked if there were any photographs of the body.

  “Would you look at it if there was one?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” She swatted at his hand as if his touch bothered her.

  Although she was hesitant to tell Phil, Janeene did not want a baby. She did not want one growing inside of her, and she especially did not want to care for one. She continued taking the pill even though she told Phil she had thrown them away in August. Since their move north she had stopped coming when they made love. She knew she did not have to reach orgasm to conceive, yet she thought that if they both came during sex it would be something greater than it was, which might somehow lead to a baby. This was something she did not want, so she refused to share her desire with him.

  Since neither of them was working and since they had so much free time, they made love often. It was frustrating to hold back, and Janeene longed for the late afternoon, when Phil went jogging. Finally alone in the house, she would escape to the upstairs bathroom. There were days when she couldn’t wait for him to get out of the house before she began touching herself. She would stand in the bathroom, her fingers covered with lotion, waiting for the slam of the front door. If the feeling was intense enough, she’d start rubbing herself, often reaching orgasm just as Phil called out good-bye. Then the house would settle around her breathing. She would do it again. This time on the bed without her clothes. It never took more than a few minutes until her body would start shaking with an incredible need that seemed to get more desperate the longer they lived in Marquette.

  She always kept her eyes closed. Either afraid or embarrassed by the act, she was not comfortable watching herself get excited alone. Afterward she would rush to do something physical like scrub the bathtub or wash the kitchen floor—anything so she didn’t have to think about what she was doing.

  Having money without working was strange for both of them, and Janeene wondered how long they could keep up with the simplicity their days presented to them. Like on a vacation that continued long after it should have, they seemed to be waiting for something to happen, for someone to tell them that it was time to go home.

  They still got up early—the same time as when they worked in the main office of the dry-cleaning business. Instead of going anywhere, they made lists of chores to do around the house, even though these were things they would finish by noon. In the early afternoon they’d walk down the street to the diner and order grilled cheese sandwiches and french fries covered in hot gravy. The waitress called them dears and filled their coffee mugs so full that the thin brown liquid poured over onto the matching saucers.

  Afterward they’d walk to the Peter White Library so Janeene could read the Detroit Free Press. She had never been particularly fond of Detroit until the move north, but now she wanted to hear everything she could about the city. Phil spent his library time looking for books on Michigan. His grandparents were from the Copper Country, one hundred miles north of Marquette, and he was interested in learning more about the history of the region. He read a book a night and told Janeene trivia about the region. The world’s only marble lighthouse was in Livingstone County. The water flowing over the Tahquamenon Falls was a dark root-beer color because of the iron ore deposits in the land. They made plans to visit these places in the summer. Janeene much preferred talk about traveling around Michigan to talk about the family Phil wanted.

  “This is good,” Phil told her one night while reading his book. “I’m happy here. He looked up from his reading, his index finger holding his place on the page.

  “It is peaceful,” Janeene agreed. She did not turn from the window.

  “My father should have sold the business when he was alive,” Phil said. “He deserved to enjoy life like this.”

  Janeene nodded, though she wasn’t sure she agreed with Phil’s enthusiasm about their decision to leave Detroit. She wanted to know what they would do if they simply lived off the money someone else
had spent his life earning. Who would they become?

  She sat backward on the couch and drew a circle design in the fog her breath made on the windowpane. There had been no news about the strangers for weeks, but she still believed the rumor as strongly as she had when the mailman first told her about the boat docking. Therefore she was not at all surprised to see two men walking up the shoveled path toward the house. She stood quickly, and when Phil asked her what was wrong, she told him there were people at the door.

  The men stood on the top steps dressed in orange Day-Glo jackets, the kind deer hunters wore. The air was bitter cold, but they seemed unaffected by the wind or the freezing temperature.

  “Our car broke down,” the younger man said, and Janeene knew as soon as she heard him speaking English with the tonality of the people from the U.P. that they were not from the boat. She was at once disappointed, as if she had been cheated out of something she deserved.

  “We need your phone,” the older man explained and then stepped inside without waiting for permission. In Detroit, they would not have answered the door unless they were sure they knew who it was, but here, so far north, with the weather the way it was, the two men seemed as harmless as snowmen. They introduced themselves as Henry and Wade, and when they both took off their hats and stuffed them into their jacket pockets at the same time, Janeene asked if they were father and son.

  “There’s no use denying that,” Henry winked at her.

  “Something I’ve been trying to do my whole life,” Wade interrupted. They did not look so much alike—Wade’s hair was white blond like a child’s, his father’s was graying. It was the way they stood—back swayed forward as if proud of their low thick stomachs—that gave them away as family.

  “Yours was the only house lit on this whole block,” Henry told Phil. Small chunks of snow fell from the tops of his boots. He shook them onto the carpet, where they stayed in perfect round shapes as if they could ignore the warmth of the house.

  Janeene looked out the window to check on her neighbors. They never seemed to be home, but she had no idea where they would be at this time of night in Marquette.

  “We’ve pissed away enough time,” Wade told his father. “Let’s not spend the rest of the night yammering on about nothing.”

  “No reason to be rude.” Henry seemed happy to be in the house. “You’ve got to talk to people. You don’t just barge in and start using their phone without saying hello. These are the kinds of things that separate us from being animals.”

  Wade told him to get moving and call Bob’s Boron up the road.

  “Ignore my son,” Henry told Phil and Janeene. “He’s not used to being around nice people.”

  Wade pushed his father as if he could physically force him to the telephone. Henry lost his balance and tumbled into Phil.

  “I’m sorry,” Phil apologized and backed further into the corner.

  “You didn’t do anything,” Henry said. “This one’s the bone-head.” He swatted at Wade with an open palm.

  Phil offered to make the call, but Henry and Wade seemed more interested in arguing than getting anything done about the car.

  “Boron’s closed down two years ago,” Henry insisted. “The building’s already been bulldozed.”

  “The station in Ishpheming is closed. This here’s Marquette. Nothing’s been bulldozed around here.”

  “I know where we are.” Henry said. “Sleeping Beauty’s the one who’s been sawing logs since we left Munising.” He closed his eyes and made exaggerated snoring noises.

  “At least I was sleeping sober,” Wade said and then turned to Janeene and asked her for a phone book. She told him they didn’t have one. Marquette, especially in the winter, was not that big a place. She said she thought the gas station on the corner of Third and Front was open until midnight.

  “Do you hear that?” Wade said. “Now go call so we can get someone to jump that thing.”

  “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” Henry argued back. “I’ve known Bob every year I’ve been on this earth. Who would know better than me how long he’s been out of work? Hell it’s probably been longer than two years. Probably closer to three.”

  “It’s always the same with you, isn’t it?” Wade asked. You’re like some kind of broken record. A goddamn broken record.” He made a circular motion with his hand, imitating a record moving round a turntable.

  “You’re talking garbage,” Henry said.

  “You just have to be right. About everything. Even if it’s none of your business.”

  “You don’t know my business,” Henry told him.

  “If you say something’s blue then it’s just got to be blue. Even if everyone else in the world says it’s green. You say blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blood vessels popping all over your face, you keep insisting on blue. No one’s listening to you. No one cares about your goddamn blue. But you won’t give up—will you, old man?”

  “What in the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about you.”

  “You got no right to talk about me.”

  Henry leaned forward and punched Wade, but his balance was unsteady and he missed. The sound they made in their throats was low and raw, like dogs breathing as they circled each other.

  Wade moved away from Henry, but Henry tried another punch. This time he stumbled and fell. Janeene didn’t see Wade touch his father, but wondered if he had tripped him.

  “Get up, old man,” Wade dropped to his knees and straddled his father’s body so that his father couldn’t move. “Get off this floor. This isn’t your floor. You can’t be sitting all over it when it’s not even yours.”

  Henry shifted his weight forward onto his elbows, but as soon as he tried to get up, Wade pushed him down. They played like kids on a seesaw.

  “Say you’re wrong,” Wade said. “Say you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You’re a lunatic,” Henry shouted back. “I don’t admit to anything.”

  “Say it,” Wade insisted.

  “Lunatic,” Henry shouted.

  “One last chance,” Wade threatened. “Just one last chance.”

  “Get off me,” Henry kicked at his son and his pants tore open. He spread his legs and showed them all the long split running up the length of his inseam. The exposed flesh of his inner thigh was bright pink, burned from the wind and cold.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” Henry yelled and slapped his son. This time Wade didn’t strike back. He laughed instead, which made Henry even madder.

  Janeene felt like she had front-row seats to a show she shouldn’t be watching. Their fighting, which had seemed so childish when they first came here, was now real. She was thrilled by the strength and anger of their fight.

  “How am I going to get home with my pants like this?” Henry tugged at the ripped material, showing the loose skin of his thigh. “Take a good look at what you’ve done.”

  “I’m not the one who ripped your pants,” Wade shot back.

  “You’re the one who didn’t want to waste the night in Marquette,” Henry argued back. “I can’t go outside like this. I’ll freeze my ass off.”

  Wade asked Phil if they could borrow a pair of pants. “Nothing special,” he said. “Just something for this drunk to wear home.”

  Phil said he’d go look for something and then motioned for Janeene to come with him. She knew he didn’t want her alone with these men, but she didn’t want to leave. She liked their arguing, however stupid it was. It was such a relief to be around people—to have something to listen to besides silence. Phil waited, and she knew she had no choice but to go with him.

  “This is ridiculous,” Phil complained once they were out of earshot. “They’re drunk and I don’t want them in the house. We should call the police.”

  Janeene checked the ragbag for something Henry could wear, but all she found were some old beach towels. The multicolored material was so out of place that it took her a moment to remember what
the towels were used for.

  “He can’t go outside with that rip in his pants,” Janeene said.

  “He outweighs me by fifty pounds,” Phil argued. “What’s going to fit him?”

  “It’s the jacket. He just looks big,” Janeene said. “You must have something he could wear.”

  Phil told her to wait there, but as soon as he went upstairs she went back into the living room, where Wade was still sitting on his father. They were engaged in some sort of silent stare-down, neither of them moving or speaking.

  Phil came down with a pair of his grandfather’s pants—light-colored wool trousers. He handed them to Henry, who thanked him with a nod of his head. Wade continued staring at his father.

  Henry unzipped his pants and Janeene told them she’d wait in the other room while he changed.

  She poured herself a glass of brandy and sipped it slowly. It was not something she drank very often, but the medicinal taste was somehow comforting and she finished the glass in three swallows.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. Phil had the trousers under his arm, his face tight with disapproval and impatience.

  “They’re too tight to get over his ankles.”

  “Do you have another pair?”

  “Not that I’m going to give him,” Phil said. “These will fit if I open the cuff a bit. They’re baggy enough for him.”

  He flipped the scissors off the pegboard and sat at the kitchen table.

  “They’re just like the people from the boat,” Janeene whispered suddenly. “Coming out of nowhere in the middle of the night like this.” It was not quite ten o’clock, but daylight seemed something foreign, something they might never see again.

  “I can’t believe you’re still listening to that nonsense,” Phil said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “All the stuff about the boat,” he said. “I’m so sick of that nonsense.”