The decision to become a firefighter occurred on one of those nights when I sat alone in a lawn chair in the McCandleses’ backyard. Timmy had stepped inside to get us each a soft drink, and his father had gone deep into his yard. The Chief was standing under an apple tree, looking up into it. He was muttering something at the time, and it had a sullen and half-angry tone to it. The yard was narrow but long. The Chief seemed to have planted everything there: apple and peach trees, a grape arbor. It was May and the air was that thick. Chief McCandles looked in my direction and I’m sure did not see me. The sound of his muttering might have reached someone else in a different way, might have sounded like an unhappiness any boy would want to run from. His life, I knew, was imperfect. Still, it seemed to me then as desirable as anything a human being should aspire to. I would go one step further and say that what I understood, at that moment, was that human beings shouldn’t desire perfection, but only to take their necessary woes into arbors, into sweet-smelling manmade enclosures. So there it was: Timmy came out with the drinks, and I had made what was to be the major decision of my life.
It took me four years, though, to save up for what Timmy got on graduation: the six months’ freedom to go off and study hose hydraulics and qualify for an EMT. In those four years, I stood as Timmy’s best man, I held his baby daughter, Erin, at the font while the priest poured holy water on her head. I even became Erin’s baby-sitter in a pinch, and learned how to change a diaper and hold an infant high on your shoulder so her stomach settles. Often, on those nights when I was usually so tired I fell asleep before they came home, I would be awakened by Lisa’s hand on my shoulder, where there might be a spit-up stain left by Erin, and I can still recall that first bleary vision of Lisa above me as I came into wakefulness, a woman who had recently grown tired, saying, “Wake up, Danny,” very gently, while behind her, Timmy stood, having drunk a little too much on their date and ready now to give me the boot so that he could get Lisa into the bedroom. Lisa’s hand, meanwhile, rested on my wet shoulder a little longer than it strictly needed to, and I believe a sympathy started up between us then.
I suppose I became less available to them as time went on. I finally saved up enough so that my mother would be all right while I went off to Cadet School, then found myself inserted, by stealth, by the complex network of allegiances that extend over two counties here, in a neighboring city’s ladder company. “We’ll wait for something to turn up in Denniston.” Chief McCandles winked. I could wait. Most nights found me waist-deep in the YMCA pool, surveying the room for the girl I would marry. There were nights when Timmy insisted on accompanying me, just to get out of the house, I think. He would stand beside me in the water, giving off signs of envy at my bachelor state, assuming, when I looked at women, he knew what was on my mind. But Timmy, by then, no longer received my intimacies—we’d grown past all that—so he couldn’t know how, when women walked through the door of the Y, tucking their hair into caps, wet from their pre-swim showers, it wasn’t sexual availability I sought, but something more specific, a quality I was later to find in Sharon, my wife. There was a certain walk, a manner of tucking the hair, a composure and a sense of banked hopes that were for me, in those days, the very composition of desire. After our swims and showers, when we sat together in the bar, I didn’t mention any of this to Timmy. Instead, I listened. It was no different from what I’d always done, allowed Timmy’s life to be the important one. By then a string of complaints had started to flow from him, all that Lisa wasn’t. I sat and waited for the moment when he would tell me he didn’t love her anymore, at which point I would rise and, in my mind’s eye anyway, punch him in the face.
I drove him home those nights, and I always waited at the foot of their driveway until he made it to the door. More often than not, Lisa would come outside before he got there, like she’d been looking out for him. There was physical contact between them, though of an uninterpretable sort: Timmy, who had so recently complained of her coldness, always reached out for her with a kind of loping, heartsick movement; she reached back, and the words he had spoken to me in the bar had this immediate tendency to fade. Somebody tells you their story, that’s not their story, I always thought, watching them. Hers was a vaguer touch than his, certainly, but they were always together when I drove off, together in a way that seemed theirs alone, keeping the same sort of secret they’d kept at the cafeteria table. Was it going to be cookies tonight, or cake? Driving away from them, I found myself doing something I very rarely did—that is, looking at both sides of the road, into the thick woods surrounding their house, as if something lay in waiting there for me to discover, something I both wished for and feared.
Such feelings, however, had usually dissipated by morning. They did not, in any case, cause me to relax my vigilance. I found and married Sharon, and nine months and four days later we had the first of our baby girls. After the first was born, we waited three months and conceived the second, all according to a plan that existed in my head and that Sharon, in her pliant and docile manner, never once raised her voice against.
Just a few months after Sharon got pregnant for the second time, Lisa found herself pregnant, too. It was too much of a coincidence for me to believe Timmy wasn’t being competitive. What was Lisa to him in those days? They’d gotten to acting surly in each other’s company. Lisa had finally finished up her degree in physical therapy and had gone back to work. She wanted to wait a couple more years before having a kid, or maybe—who knows?—stop at Erin, and Timmy wasn’t fond of that idea at all. So within three months of each other, Sharon gave birth to our second daughter, Erica, and Lisa had Pete.
When Erica was a year old, I began putting up a swing set in the yard. Here, we work three days on, three days off, so there were a lot of days when I was home, hot afternoons spent putting in the concrete footings, and being home that much, I began to notice the baby was crying a lot. Annoyed, I’d go inside the house to check on things and find Sharon in bed, while Maryann, our elder daughter, sat in front of the TV and the baby stood screaming in her crib. “What is it?” I’d ask Sharon, and she’d just look at me from the bed, drawn and pale, and like she wished I knew enough not to have to ask such a question. I’d go and get the baby and try to soothe her, then bring her to Sharon. Sharon would take her from me, all right, but a part of her just wasn’t there.
It was Lisa who had to tell me, finally. “She’s depressed, Danny.” I hated that word. It was a word I wanted to dance away from. Lisa sat there, patient, waiting for me to come back. She told me later my head did a thing, the sort of motion a dog makes, somber and terribly still, when he knows he’s about to be punished. “It happens,” she said, with some gentleness I was grateful for.
It certainly hadn’t happened to Lisa. She’d joined a gym after Pete was born, and taken off all the creamy, pleasing weight her body had taken on during two pregnancies. I guess it wasn’t pleasing to her. She talked a lot about going back to work as soon as Pete was old enough, and she was filled with a crazy kind of energy that, beside my insomnia-bred state, sometimes felt vaguely annoying.
I couldn’t sleep beside Sharon anymore: the fact of her going away distressed me too deeply. But I hadn’t the beginning of an idea what to do about it. I’d thought making love a lot would be a way of rousing Sharon, bringing her back from the dead, but it only succeeded in making her go further away. She’d stopped responding to me, or else she’d respond too late, in a way that let me know she was pretending. Then she’d fall asleep right afterward, like the fakeness of it didn’t bother her one bit.
For a while, Sharon’s mother helped out with child care, but she did it grumpily. So it was a problem. And then one day Lisa said, “Let me take the baby. I’m home anyway, with Pete. It’s no problem. Let’s let Sharon get some rest.”
Sharon never objected to this. She may have only pulled the covers closer to her chin when I proposed it, and retreated into those dreams of hers. I agreed, because I didn’t know what else to do. I put
Maryann in day care and drove Erica to Lisa’s every day I didn’t have to go on shift. And on the days when I did, Lisa came and picked up Erica herself.
The way things worked out, it never seemed too much of an intrusion on Lisa’s time. She was always full of that manic energy on those days when I came to drop Erica off. It was like she was fueled by a force toward something, though what that could be, in the house, in the baby-smelling rooms, in our little town, was out of my power to guess. She was frequently on the phone, and motioned that I should put Erica down and just go, she could handle things. But I didn’t feel right about that. Sometimes I brought Erica into the living room, where Pete was on the floor, messing with his teething rings or trying to grab their scruffy cat, and the two of them would play so well together I’d lie down on the couch and catch up on my sleep right there.
Often, I’d wake up an hour later and find Lisa and the babies sitting at the dining room table, having a snack and laughing at me. “You snore something awful, Danny,” Lisa would say. I wasn’t embarrassed, she’d caught me sleeping too many times in my life. She was like my sister, and though we’d had a careful physical relationship since high school, I retained, looking at her, some old sense of having taken baths together as children, a shared innocence that could not be broached. I was not quite a man in Lisa’s presence, but someone on his way to becoming one. If it was early enough when I woke and we neither of us had to race to pick up our older kids, mine from day care and hers from kindergarten, I’d offer to watch the babies and let her get in an extra hour at the gym. She always took me up on it, too, and sometimes, when things were going especially well in this new arrangement of ours, I became ambitious, and told Lisa she could get out more if she wanted. I even told her if she needed to go back to work a couple of times a week, I thought I could handle it. I could watch the babies on the days I wasn’t working.
“You want to be my husband, Danny?” she said when I offered all this to her, and it had a light, ridiculous sound to it that was actually a relief to me. I was aware I might be trying to step into Timmy’s shoes—not as lover, never that—but as he should have worn them, taking responsibility for what she might need. And I was careful about it, too. I only stayed with Lisa on the days when he was on shift. If he happened to be home, I never intruded, just dropped Erica off and skedaddled, let them have whatever they still had together.
One afternoon, Lisa and I were standing in the kitchen. Pete had just thrown up all over himself and she was worried he was sick. She had big, overblown worries about Pete, always. She’d taken off his clothes and begun to soak them in the sink. There were already dirty dishes there. I was holding Pete and she was trying to soak his clothes without moving the dishes and her movements seemed to me not properly thought out, even stupid. I handed her Pete and I got out a basin and filled it and soaked the clothes and then, very proud of myself, said, “There,” and looked up at her. I caught something then, though I didn’t at first want to; my reaction was to look back at the soaking clothes and maybe rearrange them. When I turned back to her, it was still there, though now covered some, it would have to be, because such intensity can’t just hang out there, it would scorch, or get scorched. But it made things uncomfortable for about ten minutes. Really, we’d just made love. It doesn’t always happen in beds, or in cars, the way people think it does, with clothes off, with organs and hands. It happens sometimes in rooms, while the man has his hand in a tub of sopping baby clothes and the woman is holding a naked infant. A thing passes, very strong, the very thing that gets you into bed, and the other catches it, registers, and things between two people are forever changed.
There was no chance, though, that Lisa and I were going to stay away from one another after that. Maybe we didn’t know enough to be scared. Instead, I took Pete and she washed her hands and went and did something else, not even in another room, right there in the kitchen; maybe wet a washcloth to cool down Pete’s body. I had him in my arms and I could feel how hot he was, how hot and unhappy. We went ahead and did our chores, just like it was any day.
And it was any day, or could have been, when it finally happened, a day when both Erica and Pete took their naps at the same time, and without either of us saying anything about it, we went into the bedroom and fucked. I say “fucked” because I don’t know any other word for it, because I closed off my mind, drew a curtain over it, from the moment I took her hand and led her in. Otherwise, I don’t know how I could have done it, let go of caution that way.
I don’t have any memories of those times, at least not of the first six months. I couldn’t describe them to you now. Maybe that’s true of all sex that matters: you try to dive back to the thing, the touch or the lick, that incited feeling in you, and you realize it came from somewhere else. I was aware, from the start, of two things: of everything about it being wrong, and everything about it mattering, in a way I had not known such things could matter before. I didn’t like this, but I followed it. I split my life in two. In the station, I made my little jokes, and laughed at the jokes of others. I did the shopping and tended to the house and went on making love to Sharon in a dim, hopeful way, and in all of these acts was a certain kind of conviction as well. I think during this time my hopes for Sharon’s return went unabated, as though that would fix things somehow. Sometimes, only sometimes, picking up a can off a supermarket shelf, I might feel my knees go weak under me for a second, and my hands grip the handles of the shopping cart until they were white, and I’d think, at these moments, that a price was about to be exacted. I’d almost welcome this, but it would pass. I’d put the can in the cart, I’d touch my daughter’s hair if one of them happened to be seated in the cart, and we’d push on to the next aisle. It would be a day.
The story I told myself, for six months, about our fucking, was that Lisa was an unhappy woman and that I might have been anyone. Not anyone. But I might have been any number of men who sat and listened, who seemed gentle, who weren’t Timmy.
What assisted this was that we didn’t talk much, really, for six months. She’d scratch my chest afterward, a long, subtle gesture. At the end, it was not so subtle, it began to hurt, like she’d been digging into me. I thought to myself at such moments: if Timmy’d just let her work, this wouldn’t be happening. Behind the house, their yard went on and on. Timmy had bought big, his father had helped him. They were half a mile from their nearest neighbor and Timmy envisioned stables. But he never put in a fence. I’d get up from the bed, I’d put on my shorts—because to stand naked in front of her was still too embarrassing—and I’d look out into that yard, imagining what I’d have put there, thinking: if Timmy just cared about his yard a little more … Even when Lisa told me once how she’d started loving me when she’d seen me so gentle with baby Erin, I didn’t hear that, or chose not to hear it. The word love stood out too much; it sounded wrong, it was something we never talked about, and so I buried it.
But then one day I was getting up from the bed and she pulled me back down. I thought I was going to hit her, I was in that moment so angry; I could sense some new, complicated demand on its way to being made, and I was on guard for it. She pulled me down and I thought what I was being asked to do was make love to her again, which I was ready to do, though angrily. That wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted me to look at her. And when I did, she burst into tears. Her face looked all bunched up and ugly, and it held a message in it, unmistakable.
Because I didn’t want to hear or see Lisa’s message, I made love to her again, in my habitual way, only she made none of the little sounds that told me: now this, and then this. She was crying, whimpering really, and it took me back to Sharon, those early nights in the car when she, too, would cry, and I’d say to myself: hold on and your life is made. But here, Lisa’s crying had an opposite effect on me. At a certain point, I stopped, I looked at her, I felt the way she was holding me. I heard some voice from far off telling me where I was. It was no surprise. I will not put a name on this moment, or on the knowl
edge I attained then, except to say that after that afternoon, the change I had dreaded at last came about. That is, the conviction with which I had attended to chores, attended to my wife, had left me, and these gestures became empty ones.
It was a blessing during this time that Sharon had ceased to need me. But nobody stays lucky forever. One night we were in the house and I was frolicking some with the kids, getting them ready for bed. Sharon, as always, was lying down, and I dipped into the bedroom and made a joke, my good mood spilling over to her, and watched her smile. In some remote, unaffected corner, I wished her well; wished even, out of long habit, for her recovery. Then I went back to the girls. Erica was easy enough to get to sleep, but Maryann required a long story. I sat in the rocking chair and rocked and read her something—“Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” I think—and practically fell asleep myself. Then I tucked her in and went into the bedroom and lay beside Sharon.
The lights were on downstairs but I was too tired to go down there and shut them off. I thought I’d just go to sleep and leave them blazing. I had only my gym shorts on, as I recall. Suddenly I felt her hand on my chest, a thing I hadn’t felt there in a long time. She stroked and stroked and I tried to read her gesture, tried to see it as a thing in time and space requiring a thoughtful response. She kept doing it so long I almost fell asleep under it, but then she was stroking my belly and finally her hand went under my shorts. I woke up then. The next thing was Sharon was climbing on top of me, doubly surprising because that had never been her preferred position. I hoped she had the diaphragm in, because I found in that instant that I no longer wanted Joe. I shut my eyes and listened to her take her pleasure from out of some closed, protected place inside of which I’d locked myself.
Country of a Marriage Page 5