She continued to grip her raincoat. Her pale throat was bare. “You’ll have to forgive me for coming out like this,” she said, her voice still calling. “But I just got home myself and I’m not resettled yet.”
Sheryl nodded. She saw a purple flush spreading across Rick’s cheek and jaw. She wanted him to start the engine.
“I’m back and forth, you know,” his mother said.
Sheryl said, “Yeah.” She thought of reaching for the keys herself.
“But getting better all the time,” the woman said with a laugh. The rain was beginning to dampen her hair. “Or so they tell me.” She smiled. “Or so they want to believe.” She suddenly looked up at the sky. “It’s too bad about this rain,” she said.
Sheryl nodded. “I hate it.”
Rick’s mother dropped her eyes to the girl, seemed to look into her face and her lap and then her face again. A tremor, as quick and delicate as a pulse, passed over her features, through her lips and her cheeks and across her eyelids, so quickly it seemed a drop of rain had simply moved like a shadow across her face.
“I hate it too,” she said. “It makes me think we’ve lost the sun and don’t even know it.”
Rick shot forward then, as if he’d had all he could bear; and started the car. The cloud of exhaust rose like a sail behind them. “We’re going,” he said.
She stepped back from the door, still smiling, but didn’t say another word.
When they stopped at the end of the block, Rick said, “Did she go in?”
Sheryl turned to look over her shoulder and his. She expected to see her there for some reason, if only because crazy people were supposed to be unreliable. Were supposed to stand out in the rain.
Through the thin white exhaust she saw only the empty sidewalk and the street. “Yeah,” she said. “She’s gone.” She saw him raise his dark glasses and peer under them into the rear view mirror, his eyes startling in their resemblance to hers.
“She just asked me for money,” he said when they had begun driving again.
Sheryl sank down beside him and put her cheek to his wet coat. “What for?”
She watched the leafless trees pass and then the tall lampposts along the boulevard. “She wants to get out of here,” he said, and they both knew that he meant not merely out of our town or our state or the wet midwinter climate, but the world itself.
When Sheryl arrived in Ohio, her aunt and uncle were waiting for her at the airport, smiling reproachful but sympathetic smiles. Her aunt kissed her. Her uncle took her flight bag, which was nearly empty and marked with the name of another airline but which she had believed to be as requisite as a ticket and a seatbelt. “Well,” her aunt and uncle said together, recognizing in one word the severity and complexity of her problem but saying also that they would make the best of it. “Well, well.”
Outside, the sun had nearly set. Sheryl had to turn to look behind her to see the clear streak of scarlet at the horizon and, pressing down upon it like a hand, the dark blue sky. In it, the evening star seemed a tiny keyhole that gave promise of a wide, white-silver room. She did not wonder what Rick was doing at that very moment (he was pulling into the parking lot outside the supermarket where she had worked, tossing a cigarette from his window), if he gazed at the same star, but thought instead that the sun set in the west and so this road took them east. Faced her toward home. She watched the road signs carefully as they passed.
She had expected a farmhouse. Not because her uncle was a farmer, she knew he did something for GM, but because her mother had told her they lived on four acres. Sheryl had no clear idea of how large an acre was, but she associated them with farming and couldn’t imagine any other reason for having four.
But instead they pulled into a long flat driveway that led to a new raised ranch, sparsely landscaped and lit like a car lot. Bright spots illuminated the driveway and the garage and hung from under the eaves all around the house: two shone on the huge front door. With them, and the flat treeless land that stretched unbroken for as far as she could see in the new darkness, Sheryl felt for the first time that she had been exiled, sent to an outpost, to the very edge of something she could only define as home.
Her uncle slammed the trunk of the car and the sound seemed final and remote in the summer air.
The front door opened before she and her aunt and uncle had reached it, and their daughter, Sheryl’s cousin Pam, called a mellifluous “Hello.” She was in her late twenties or early thirties, pretty and wide-bottomed, with a round, dimpled face that for a moment as she smiled in the spotlight seemed stark white. She embraced Sheryl lightly but kept an arm around her as she led her into the house.
Inside, the hallway had a high ceiling and ended in a pair of steps, one that went down to a family room, another that led up to the rest of the house. Its walls were lined with family photographs, a gallery of sorts, meant either to give a new visitor an immediate one-stop introduction to the entire family and its history or to remind the family members themselves, each time they passed through the door, of the complex weave of faces and lives that had been spun to produce them. Sheryl saw her parents in their wedding clothes, the familiar, old-fashioned studio portrait of her grandmother at twenty-five, newly arrived in America. And again her parents, sitting on a couch somewhere, holding her, a toddler, between them.
Pam was talking about her obstetrician. “He got me through three kids and one almost,” she said. “He looks like Dr. Zorba, doesn’t he, Mom? But he’s as nice as he can be.” She said he had agreed to squeeze Sheryl in tomorrow morning.
They went up the stairs and down a short hallway to the room, between the kitchen and the bathroom, where Sheryl was to stay. The TV room they called it, although the TV had apparently been removed and replaced by a small set of cardboard drawers covered in pink satin. The fold-out couch had already been opened and made up, and someone had put a can of hairspray and a number of half-empty perfume bottles on a table near the bed.
Pam helped her unpack her clothes, pausing more than once to hold up a skirt or a pair of jeans and to squeal, “How do you get into these?” She herself wore a pale blue shirtwaist with a thin plaid belt, loafers and white bobby socks. Her hair was a perfect flip. “Believe me,” she said. “They won’t fit much longer.”
She asked if Sheryl sewed, and the girl shook her head. “I’ll teach you,” Pam said. “It’s not worth buying maternity clothes when you can just run something up on the machine. It’ll be fun.”
She sat on the edge of the bed. She talked incessantly in a bright, warm voice. Her younger brother, she said, was away at camp for the summer, a counselor. The older one lived in St. Louis. Her own house was just a mile or two away. She’d bring her kids over in the morning. She couldn’t wait for Sheryl to meet them. She said she knew three kids weren’t that many, compared to some people, but it was enough to make her feel she could answer any questions Sheryl had. “For instance,” she said, “I had a saddle block for the last one.” She arched her back and reached behind her. “That’s when they put a needle right into your spine. You don’t feel anything from the waist down and it’s marvelous. But you’re awake enough to actually see the baby be born. I mean, if you want to.”
Sheryl watched her from the other side of the room, her brush in her hand.
“Of course,” Pam went on, “you can just be knocked out. That’s not bad either.”
Until this moment, Sheryl had not thought seriously about the baby to be born. Until now, she thought of the pregnancy itself as her dilemma, as if it were, in itself, a complete fact, without implication. All she had feared in the past two months was the moment she would have to walk into her mother’s bedroom to tell her, and she had considered her punishment, the consequence of her confession, to be only the cold, humiliating examination she had had that morning, and then this exile.
Now she saw it was endless. It stretched infinitely before her, as fully burdensome as all the years she had yet to live.
“Father
Tom at the church,” Pam went on, adding to it, “will put you in touch with a wonderful agency, and you can be sure the family will be Catholic. He’ll tell you all about it if you want. Whenever you’re ready. He’s a doll.”
Sheryl turned to place her brush on the flimsy dresser.
“I’ll make some calls about your school situation. You can probably do something like a correspondence course while you’re here. You could get books from the high school here in September. I’m going to see if a friend of mine can come over and help you out. She taught before her kids came.”
Sheryl heard her aunt in the kitchen, dropping ice cubes into glasses. She heard a sound, remote and faint, like the rumble of trucks on some distant highway. She would have to get up early to see where the sun rose.
“What would you like to have,” Pam asked softly just as the aunt called, “Girls—iced tea!” “A boy or a girl?”
Sheryl paused for a moment. She had heard the word whispered among the neighborhood women from time to time, on those mornings when my own mother had returned from the hospital empty-handed, and had slowly come to understand its meaning. She had learned there was a sense of disappointment in it, but no threat or damage. It meant simply that a certain future had failed to arrive. That all had gone back to what it was, to what it had been before.
She tossed her hair defiantly and turned to face her cousin. “I’d like to have a miscarriage,” she said.
Even as Pam flinched, her mouth closing with the shock of the word, Sheryl saw that she also forgave her. “You say that now,” she said softly. “But just wait. You won’t always feel that way.”
“I will,” Sheryl said, but she saw there would be no convincing her.
“Talk to me in six more months,” Pam said. “You’ll see.”
That evening, with her aunt and uncle safely in bed, Sheryl walked down the stairs to the hallway with the photographs and then down the second set of steps to the family room. She placed a pillow over the phone there, dialed the number she had written in ink on the inside of her arm, the same number she had dialed from the airport when she had told her mother she was going to the bathroom. Then it had rung and rung, but now it was snatched up before the first ring had barely begun, as if someone had been waiting for it. Not Rick, though; it was a woman’s voice that said hello. Sheryl asked for him in a whisper.
The only light in the room came from the bright spot outside and made the linoleum floor seem black, threw bars of light and shadow across the couch where she sat. There was too long a pause before the voice said another hello. Sheryl realized that this woman, too, was whispering.
“May I speak to Rick?” she said again, raising her voice a bit.
The woman, his mother, raised hers a bit as well. “He’s not here,” she said. “He’s gone out.” There was another pause, filled only with the hollow sound of the line, the distance between them. Sheryl imagined the woman in a darkened room like this one, cupping the receiver to her lips.
“This is Sheryl,” she said, and the woman softly repeated her name, exclaiming it in a throaty whisper. And then, as if they were exchanging secrets, “This is Rick’s mom.”
“Will you tell him I called?” Sheryl said. The woman was silent, and Sheryl rushed on, “Will you tell him I’m at my aunt’s house,” the receiver so close to her mouth she wondered briefly if it might have been stopping her words rather than carrying them, “in Ohio.” She paused and listened for her aunt or uncle’s footsteps. On the other end, beyond the static, she could sense Rick’s mother listening to the house behind her, too, touching her fingertips to the dry patch on her head.
“Will you tell him?” she said again, although she knew even then that she would not. “Will you please tell him?” It struck her as familiar, this repetition of what she knew already was a futile, a meaningless, plea.
“I don’t know where he is,” Rick’s mother whispered. “I’m back and forth, you know.”
“I know,” Sheryl said. “But tell him, will you? I don’t know when I can call again.”
“Sure,” the woman murmured, seeming to address someone else in the room, although Sheryl was quite certain there was no one else there, that Rick’s mother had been wandering like a ghost through her own darkened house when the phone rang; that she was as much a frightened stranger in it as Sheryl was in this one.
When the woman hung up, abruptly and without another word, Sheryl slipped quietly up the stairs and into her room, stopping for just a moment at the closet in the hallway to search the pockets of the coats hanging there for spare change, as Rick had told her his mother used to do whenever she was preparing to leave them.
The four acres, Sheryl learned, were not all barren, nor did they stretch evenly all around. She saw with the light that there were other houses on either side of her aunt and uncle’s and, at the far end of their property, a line of trees that marked the edge of a highway. She was not certain if it was the highway on which she had come, but it was a highway nonetheless and given enough time she could walk to it.
Pam drove her downtown to the doctor’s office the next morning, where the old man smiled at her with wet pale blue eyes. When he had finished his exam, he grasped her forearm and shook it a little, then patted her shoulder (the one gesture meaning bear up; the other, soon it will be over), just as so many people had done the day of her father’s funeral.
As they were leaving, he took her chin in his hand and ran a flat thumb over a spattering of pimples there. “Why do you want to hide such a pretty face behind so much makeup?” he asked her.
She lowered her eyes, her cheeks burning. What she had done with Rick, what had brought her here, had been done in darkness and without words and had made her feel completely adult. These men in their bright offices seemed bent on reversing that. As if humiliation, a confirmation of her immaturity, were part of her treatment and cure. Or as if their smiling ministrations would win her back her childhood.
When they left the office, Pam asked if she’d like to look at some patterns.
Sheryl said, “I really don’t care,” and then followed her into a large old variety store where the floors were wood and almost soft with wear and the air smelled of plastic and popcorn. Sheryl went to the makeup counter first. Her mother had given her a twenty-dollar bill when she got on the plane, promising to send more later. Sheryl’s father used to say that money burned a hole in her pocket, but when she handed the bill to the cashier (she bought lipstick and turquoise-blue eyeshadow, another mascara and a thick blue compact, daring her cousin to repeat the doctor’s words), she felt a real sense of loss, almost a fear, and she quickly folded the change, the broken bill, into her palm.
In the notions department, Pam led her to three pattern books as big as dictionaries, with thick, glossy pages. She flipped them over expertly, found the right section and then turned the pages for Sheryl as if she were a child.
“Just stop me when you see something you like,” she said, but then paused at every other page herself to coo over the pastel drawings of pregnant women in loose blouses and skirts, dresses as wide and roomy as tents, all with bows and ruffles and appliques, all somehow infantile.
“This would look cute on you,” Pam would say. Or, “Oh, I like this one.”
Sheryl stood at her side, watching silently. At the end of the section (Sheryl noticed that formals were next, prom gowns and bridesmaid dresses, as if the pattern people had gotten their chronology as backward as she had), Pam turned to her. “Anything?” she asked brightly.
Again she merely shrugged. Pam went to the next book and repeated the process, but silently this time. As she moved on to the third, she said, her eyes on the pages and her voice low for what seemed the first time, “You know, Sheryl, I’d really like to be your friend.” She paused and there was only the sound of the store: a cash register ringing and someone calling, “Miss, Miss.” “I know you’re having a hard time right now. And I know you think you don’t need anybody else, but let me tell you,
you do.” She laughed, almost bitterly. “Believe me, even under the best of circumstances you need a friend, a girlfriend, to help you through what you’re about to go through. You really do.” She turned to look at her. Her small eyes were green and there was a dimple in her round fleshy chin. She had a fine yellow moustache. “I’m trying to be your friend.”
Sheryl stepped back a little, aware already of all that had begun to insinuate itself between them: her cousin and her uncle and her aunt, their big house, this town, the baby to be born, even the hours since she’d last seen him—all coming between them when she’d promised it couldn’t happen.
She spoke sullenly. “I know it,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me, I know it.”
She felt Pam watching her for a moment and then heard her sigh, impatiently, and continue turning pages. Suddenly and almost against her will, Sheryl raised her hand. She saw her own round finger on one of the glossy pages. She had not been spoken to so directly, had not had anyone but Rick so directly meet her eye, since her father had died.
“I like this one,” she said quickly.
That night they gathered early, in the middle of a deserted dead-end street by the reservoir. This was the starting point for drag races, the scene of a much talked about rumble between another set of car-driving hoods and a motorcycle gang from the next town, the place where many of them, Rick included, had once crashed through the high weeds and fallen flat on their stomachs, walkie-talkies and toy machine guns in their hands. (And one of them always stepped in dog dirt; one of them always found something odd and evil: an old rubber glove, a toilet seat, a damp and muddy magazine.) It was a no-man’s-land, a blank space in the neighborhood. A street with a broken curb but no sidewalks, no driveways, no homes. Just tangled grass and trees and tall yellow weeds and a high chain-link fence beyond which the earth seemed to end, dipping as it did into the steep-sided and dried-out reservoir. Years and years ago, a child had drowned there and so all the following generations of children—including my own—were told it was off bounds. It still retained that sense of the forbidden.
That Night Page 11