“What are you taking, English?”
“No, I guess I’ll take some stupid education course.” And here it was, the opinion I’d formed completely by myself. “It just suddenly seems quite ridiculous to take lit courses, whenever I get looking at them in the catalog I want to go throw up. Education courses are even more ridiculous, in a way, and I certainly got my fill of them as well as lit at Brompton, but I think I could stand it better because I don’t give a damn about education.”
“That’s the spirit,” he said.
I heard myself laughing. Candles trembled in the dark red room. What a crazy place for me to be.
“Come on,” he said, “let’s go have our pizza.”
“Okay.”
Outdoors, it was still the long pale evening saved by the daylight saving. He helped me up into the bus. I was being taken care of again.
I ate the last of my share of the pizza and said, “I wish these places would choose some other color, what is this thing everybody’s got about red?”
“I guess it’s supposed to be warm or something.”
And, despite the air conditioning, it was, warm with the smell of oregano and oil. When we went outdoors, the smell stayed with us, into the bus, but as we drove off down the street of gas stations and discount department stores and bowling alleys and supermarkets, neon signs shouting at us, it faded away into the smell of exhaust fumes. I wished it hadn’t.
Warren said, “This is called the Miracle Mile.”
“What’s the miracle?”
“I don’t know. Money, maybe.”
“God, I like pizza. Thank you, that was awfully good.” If only, I thought, it hadn’t been such a red plastic place, if only it had been a wonderfully filthy beer joint like the one we used to go to in Brompton, Garafano’s, which looked like a long wooden houseboat moored on a stark field, and where Mrs. Garafano, thin and freckled, stood behind the bar and talked across her baby set upon it, and students drank dimies and ate meatball sandwiches, and the people from the farms sat in booths whose tables were crowded with thick plates of steak rinds and scraps of french fries growing skins of grease. Now and then their children would clamber down from the seats and run the length of the room and back again; from the jukebox Connie Francis whined songs; and Mr. Garafano in person, a square dark man wearing a T-shirt, with a dish towel tucked into the waistband of his trousers, would come out of the kitchen to bring you your pizza.
Warren was saying, “I’ve got some Canadian Club at home, do you suppose that would mix?”
I prefer scotch, I thought before I thought, oh, Jesus, now what do I do, when I knew of course I could simply say no. I looked at the Timex watch I’d bought this summer; I’d never particularly needed a watch these past years. Eight thirty. I must have been thinking of the apartment, the mirror, the terror of tomorrow as I said, “Canadian Club would be lovely.”
He turned at a gas station whose signs called out that its automatic car wash was only ninety-nine cents (without wax), and we drove past decaying duplex houses, an old factory, a grimy meat store—COST PLUS 10 PERCENT!—up a hill into the backyard of a big shabby house layered with asphalt shingles, gray in the twilight.
“Home sweet home,” Warren said. He opened the door. “When I couldn’t stand it any longer I used to go over and stay at my folks’ for a while, but they moved to Florida last year. Sarasota. I guess I’ve really got to start hunting for another place.”
I lived in an attic; he, I realized as I stepped into the kitchen, lived in a cellar. But it was nice and cool. He turned on the light and I saw the gray cement walls, the ceiling so low it made him seem even taller, a small cellar window uncurtained, the empty can of sloppy joe sauce and a plastic bag half full of hamburger buns on the counter, the candle stuck in a Chianti bottle on the little wooden table. A pair of blue sweatpants was thrown over a chair.
But no matter what he said about the place, he seemed to grow more easy here, like anyone coming home. He opened a cupboard and took out a fifth of Canadian Club, although the tumblers he next took down were decorated with labels of other kinds of booze—a Cutty Sark and a Beefeater’s.
“Is water okay?” he said. “Or ginger ale, I think I’ve got some ginger ale.”
“What?” I said. I had just noticed political stickers stuck on the brown tile floor as if marking a trail; HUMPHREY AND MUSKIE, they said, NIXON AND AGNEW, PETERSON FOR GOVERNOR, KING FOR SENATOR, and disappeared into the next room. “Oh, that’s fine, water’s fine.”
“Those things are left over from last year,” he said, opening the yellowed refrigerator. “The girl I was going with, she wasn’t old enough to vote but she’d worked for McCarthy and she wanted to have a party and stay up all night and watch the returns come in on TV and get drunk because everything was so rotten. And we had this big party, but I don’t know how late everyone else stayed; I went to bed.” Ice clunked. “Let’s go sit down.”
We followed the red-white-and-blue trail into the living room which was very small and dark and crowded with a sagging sofa and armchairs, a lobster trap for a coffee table, and an elaborate stereo. There were more candles in more wine bottles. He lit two, and I saw that one wall displayed a poster of Nixon looking tricky; it asked, WOULD YOU LET THIS MAN SELL YOU A USED CAR?
Warren put a record on the stereo, fussing over it. “Heathkit,” he said. “Built it myself.”
“Really?” I said, and sat down cautiously on the sofa. Springs could be felt but were not painful. The room reminded me of apartments people had when we were in school.
“It’d’ve cost about three hundred bucks,” he said, “if I’d bought its equivalent. I made it for two hundred. Hey, what’s the matter, are you crying?”
“No, of course not,” I said, and I truly wasn’t, I was only on the brink, and I was always on the brink these days. “It’s a beautiful stereo.”
Peggy Lee sang about a spinning wheel.
“Scared about school?” he said.
I said, “All I’ve ever done is practice teaching, and that was nine years ago. I hated it then and I’ll hate it now.”
He sat down beside me and balanced his Cutty Sark glass on the slats of the lobster trap. “How come you didn’t do something else, then, go to Boston and get a job in an office or something?”
“I don’t know, I never thought of that,” I said, surprised at the idea. “I just thought of teaching. I sort of automatically took the education course at Brompton, my mother’s a teacher, an elementary school teacher, and she went back to work when my father died, and I figured an education would be like insurance, I knew I’d never want to teach, but it seemed sensible, something definite I could fall back on if I had to. So now I’ve fallen.”
“Tell you what,” he said. “Do you like to run?”
“Run?”
“What time do you suppose you’ll get out of the meeting? I’ll give you a call and we can go over to the track at the park and run, you won’t believe how great it’ll make you feel.”
“Run?”
“I run a mile every afternoon. You’ll have to take it easy, for a start, maybe just one lap and see how you feel. How do you feel?” he said, and kissed me. The sofa cushions began to slide slowly forward, but just as I thought we were about to land on the floor he braced us back; he was apparently much practiced in coping with this sofa.
Illicit was how I felt. Did I expect David to come storming in on us, me with my jersey now rucked up, and this stranger? Stop thinking of David. I touched Warren and was actually astonished that he was the same as David; I’d known only theoretically that other men were. I told myself, well, you decided to keep on taking the Pill so you wouldn’t get ghastly cramps as you always did before, free of cramps you are, and also free for this, revenge on David, but David is free of you and he doesn’t care. Then we were standing, and the cushions slid down like a dark-brown avalanche.
What the hell, I thought. We went toward the bedroom. The only bachelor bedrooms I’d eve
r seen were pictures in Playboy magazine; this certainly didn’t look like them, except perhaps for the candlelight shadows. No bedspread, just a blanket and sheets on the bed. A beer can and a box of oyster crackers on the bedside table. A television on the old bureau. And Warren on me, tentative but urgent, our clothes slipping off, and when he kissed my breasts the shock was like that time I got grabbed, and, suddenly resenting his violation of God knows what, certainly not my virginity, I almost pushed him away, and then a mechanical excitement began, and then, even though everything about him was wrong, he was too tall, his hair was dark, not fair, he smelled of a different aftershave, a different deodorant, mechanical excitement bloomed into delightful excitement and I thought, he likes me, I can’t be nothing if he likes me, and I hugged him to me. Afterward, we laughed at a silly program on TV and ate stale oyster crackers.
It already had become a habit to spend my free period and my lunch period in the teachers’ room, but it didn’t occur to me why this seemed so natural until now, as I was scraping the last of my cottage cheese out of my thermos jar. David, I thought, it’s because David had the teachers’ room habit and he’d talk more about teachers’ room conversations than what happened in his classroom. Until the last year, when he didn’t talk about school at all.
Kaykay Harrison crumpled up the aluminum foil which had wrapped her half sandwich and dropped it in the wastebasket. She said, “I wasn’t as hungry before I started as I am now, and I was starving then.” She opened her pocketbook and took out a pack of Salems. “Want one?”
“Thanks.” It had also, since that first jittery day at school, become a habit to bum a cigarette once in a while. I wished Cliff Parker, the head of the English Department, would come in; he smoked Pall Malls.
Kaykay was about twenty-four, taught social studies, wore an engagement ring, and was dark-haired and pretty. “Just look at them,” she said, “and almost every one of them at least ten pounds overweight.”
I inhaled menthol, and, dizzy, sipped my machine-brewed coffee and looked at the people eating sandwiches and at the people with trays of the hot lunch which today was a slice of ham covered with raisins in a sauce that resembled phlegm, accompanied by mashed potatoes and pickled beets and a square of applesauce cake. The men were discussing the pros and cons of buying snowmobiles this coming winter; the women, except for a lanky practice teacher named Valerie Something, were talking about a student they suspected was pregnant. The small beige room stank of cigarette smoke.
David’s teachers’ room in Thornhill High School was the boiler room. There were two wooden benches, and a chicken-wire fence around the boiler, and the janitors washed the garbage cans cozily nearby. Every year out of the eight we lived in Thornhill David would petition for a proper teachers’ room, and every year the administration decided, of course, that all the rooms were needed for classes. Maybe, at last, he grew fond of it, because it must have been mostly where he talked with, grew friendly with, and fell in love with Ann Turner. Romance in the boiler room.
Kaykay said, “You know Grace Fifield, she teaches business, we share an apartment and we swap making lunches, she’ll make them one week and then I will. When it’s my turn, I practically sit right down on the kitchen floor and bawl, I have to make her a whole sandwich and pack some pickles and some Fritos Corn Chips, for God’s sake, and some cookies for dessert. She’s one of those people who can eat anything and never gain, and I had to end up rooming with her. I tell her she ought to’ve warned me, she ought to wear a sign. Watching TV at night, she’ll sit and eat a bowl of ice cream.”
The door opened and Cliff Parker came in. “Ice cream?” he said to Kaykay.
“Sorry, I was just talking about it, I haven’t got any.”
He went to the coffee machine and then sat down near us in an overstuffed chair whose plastic upholstery was ripped. “I hope you weren’t talking lightly, ice cream is a very important thing.” Out of his sport jacket pocket he produced a package of Nabs. This was his lunch. Sometimes they were cheese crackers and peanut butter, and sometimes they were malted milk crackers and peanut butter. He said, “Do you ever go to the UNH Dairy Bar? They’ve got the best ice cream around. But it’s all so good it’s a hell of a decision to choose which kind. I’ve been known to vacillate for fifteen minutes in front of the flavors sign.”
His hair was thick and curly, and so was his beard, and both were nearly equally a tangle of gray and brown. He couldn’t be more than thirty-five; was gray still premature at that age?
Kaykay said, “Chocolate walnut, that’s the only flavor in the whole world. At least, if my memory serves me; it’s been so long I’ve forgotten what it tastes like.”
“Try what I do,” Cliff said. “Go over and have a cone for supper. For your whole supper.” I had assumed he was married; this sounded as if he was single. And watching his weight, how funny. But Warren went jogging; yet that was for the exercise.
Cliff said, “Sometimes I sin, however. I have a sundae.”
“Oh, stop it!” Kaykay wailed. Then she asked, “What kind?”
“That’s another terrible decision, but it’s usually hot fudge.”
Kaykay said, “What kind of ice cream in it? I always felt that chocolate walnut ought to be best, but actually vanilla is.”
He said, “Coffee also should be considered.”
“My fiancé, Bob, that’s what he says his favorite flavor is, coffee, and I say for crying out loud why, it’s a flavor you can drink all day long, it’s nothing different!”
She had really become rather violent. Cliff was grinning at me, and I began to laugh. Although he was my immediate boss, he didn’t talk much shop here. It was usually these mock-grave discussions of subjects like food and murder mysteries. I said, “What used to be my favorite was hot butterscotch sundaes with maple walnut ice cream.”
“Aha,” he said. “Now that’s something I haven’t tried.”
I said, “I worked in a dairy bar summers, when I was in high school. I tried everything, it was free.”
“I was a milkman summers, but all I could try was milk.”
“Chocolate milk?” Kaykay asked.
Out the window, the sky above the football field was deep October blue. An autumn day, the chilly mornings, the warm sunny afternoons. The weather had changed to autumn right after Labor Day, as if this year Labor Day signaled Nature, also, to get back to work.
And so must I, back to my classroom and pronouns and twenty-three general freshmen. Suddenly I was almost physically sick with yearning for my days at Thornhill, the hours at the typewriter, the shirts I ironed, the floors I mopped, the meals I planned and cooked. And yet. And yet my routine was nearly the routine of an animal, dark and unconscious and blind. At three thirty in the afternoons I would take a book and sit and wait for David to come home. Ann Turner, though no prettier than I and actually a year older and a guidance counselor, of all things, must have seemed, by contrast, alive.
I said, “Have you tried jogging?”
Valerie, the practice teacher, looked up from the papers she was correcting. “You go jogging?” she asked. “Where?”
“At the park in Hull.”
Cliff said, “I read the book about it and that completely exhausted me,” and took out his pack of Pall Malls. “Would you like one, Emily?”
“Thank you,” I said. He lit it for me. I always hated to have my cigarettes lit, so David hadn’t. I inhaled. “Wow,” I said, instantly reeling. I picked up the Saturday Review he’d brought in. “May I?” I looked at the ads in the back.
He said, “Planning to leave us already?”
I laughed but didn’t answer. TEACHING OPPORTUNITIES. AUSTRALIA WANTS YOU! JOBS! JOBS! HOUSEMOTHER FOR RESIDENTIAL SCHOOL. The ad I paused at said, “Manpower, Inc., needs experienced stenos, typists,” and I thought again of what Warren had said about working in an office. If there was one thing I was, it was an experienced typist. But I had no shorthand or anything. Did you need shorthand nowadays, didn’t the
y have machines?
And as I walked back to my classroom, along the pastel-painted cinderblock corridors teeming with hordes of pushing and yelling kids, I tried to picture myself living alone in Boston or New York, working in some office, and I couldn’t.
“All right,” I said to the class, “let’s settle down.” I opened the grammar book and waited, and while they settled I remembered being enclosed in the house we rented in Thornhill, snug, the snow above the windowsills, the furnace sighing warmth, the white winter sunlight in the kitchen.
I left school that afternoon more anxious than ever to get home and change and go to the park with Warren. In the rearview mirror the school, long and flat and dreary, diminished. I drove past little houses, most of which had Virgin Mary statues on their lawns with sometimes in the fallen leaves a floodlight to show her off at night. Millbridge was very French Canadian, more so than Saundersborough, but Saundersborough was enough French Canadian to make me quite capable of pronouncing and spelling my students’ names, because they were names of friends I had grown up with. Beauchesne. Duquette. Marcoux. Pelletier. Vachon. And, of course, my brother-in-law was John Ouellette.
Main Street was the most miserable one I’d ever seen, and although I hoped I might come to feel affection for its ugliness, as I was beginning to with Hull’s, I hadn’t yet and doubted if I would. The smell of the mills and the tannery. Drab stores along the polluted river. For some reason I glanced up, and in this Main Street the surprise was intensified, the surprise you get after seeing only, knowing only, the downstairs façades of stores as you walk or drive past and then one day you look up and see windows, curtains, a geranium, a face. A fat old woman sat in a window, watching the cars below.
There were more little houses on the way to Hull, and Millbridge became Hull where apartment buildings were being constructed in a field. Milkweed pods had blown white. There was a shopping plaza, and the Miracle Mile. It was rather like being always a commuter, I thought, this living in Hull and working in Millbridge and going to a class in Durham, or was it like being a displaced person? Displaced from David.
One Minus One (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 3