T.C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, Volume II

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Sid doesn’t want to be bothered, she can see that. He thinks she’s crazy, calling him at work every time a strange car pulls into the lot, sitting out there over her turtles and chasing dogs away from the Canada geese, ringing up the Yorktown cops so many times they don’t even bother to send a patrol car anymore. He’s already turned back to the paper—“It’s nothing, Miriam, nothing, don’t worry yourself”—when she drops the oranges right back in the crate and snatches up the binoculars. At first she can’t make out a thing, but then she focuses on the door, and sure enough, it’s standing open and there’s movement there, a man’s face showing like an image in a slide projector, presented and withdrawn all in the space of an instant. “Sid. Sid!”

  The look he gives her is not a loving look. He sighs in that way he has when he’s feeling put-upon, a sigh that could contain a novel’s worth of martyrdom and resentment. But then she’s handing him the binoculars and he’s standing there erect at the window, focusing in. After a moment, he emits a low curse. “Son of a bitch,” he mutters, and he strides across the room to the door even as she calls out, “Take a coat!” and tries to fumble into her parka and slip on her boots all at the same time.

  By the time she reaches the gates—and the big brass padlock there is hanging open, no question about it—he’s already at the paddleball courts, moving swiftly, his shadow jogging on ahead of him. It’s cold and she’s forgotten her glasses. She digs into her pockets, but can only come up with one mitten. The pain in her hip is back, as sharp as a scalpel. She’s forcing herself on, breathing hard, breathing as if she’s about to have a heart attack, when she hears the shouts ring out, and she makes the open door just in time to see Richie Spano, in a black peacoat and with the dark slash of a mustache slicing his face in two, standing over Sid, who’s stretched out supine on the gray concrete floor. What she doesn’t know, not yet, because she hardly ever talks to Marsha anymore, is that Vic Janove, who’s run the concession stand for the past twenty years and who’s become as close to the Goldsteins as she and Sid used to be when they were young together, has asked Richie, as a favor, to look after the place while he’s in Florida.

  Sid is down on the concrete. He’s sixty-eight years old and he’s just been in a fistfight. And Richie, the breath issuing from his mouth like one of those dialogue balloons in the funny papers, squares his shoulders, swings round and walks right past her and out the door, and all he says, his voice so fierce and choked he can barely get it out, is, “You bitch. You stupid interfering bitch.”

  [This too is family legend, though it’s etched in pain. Sid, who had suffered what the neurologists quaintly call an insult to the brain when his head struck the concrete, was too stubborn to go to the doctor. He’d been knocked down before. It was nothing. He took a fistful of aspirin to quell his headache, asked Miriam to make him a cup of tea and maybe some soup, borscht or chicken noodle, it didn’t matter, because he wasn’t really hungry anyway. Three days later, when finally he relented, and she, unsteady on her feet herself, tried to help him down to the car, he collapsed in the driveway. He was dead before she could get the car door open.]

  It’s a Saturday in July, another Saturday, the voices of children careening about her and the steady thwock of the dense black rubber ball punctuating her thoughts. These are new children, of course, the children and grandchildren of her friends and of the new people too. She barely glances at the men on the paddleball court—they’re interchangeable, their bare legs furred in dark swirls, T-shirts glued to their torsos, sweatbands at their wrists. Their voices rise and fall, immemorial. Someone laughs. A radio buzzes, seeking the signal. Thwock. Thwock. She knows it will all be lost, everything we make, everything we love, everything we are.

  Her eyes close, the sun pressing at her lids like a palpable weight. She can feel everything, every molecule of the hot aluminum slats of the chair and the fading grains of sand, she can taste the air and smell the cold depths of the lake, where no one ever drowns and every child comes home safely. There’s a splashing in the shallows, a dog raising its voice in ecstasy, the sharp tocsin of the lifeguard’s whistle. And then peace, carving out a space where the big green turtles rise lazily from the depths and the geese float free and a little girl, somebody’s daughter, comes wet and shivering to her mother’s sun-struck embrace.

  (2009)

  What Separates Us from the Animals

  When the new doctor first moved in—it was a year ago now, in January—my husband Wyatt and I had him over to dinner. We were being neighborly, of course, that goes without saying, but we were also curious to see what he was like when his guard was down. After he’d had two Cutty Sarks and water, that is, and maybe half a bottle of chablis, and he was sitting by the fire with his legs stretched out before him and the remains of a platter of my cranberry tarts balanced on the swell of his belly. That was when you found out what a man was really like, in the afterglow of dinner, when he was digesting, and believe me the doctor had been no slouch at the table, putting away two steaming helpings of lobster bisque, a grilled haddock fillet with rosemary potatoes and my own tartar sauce, three buttered slices of homemade sourdough and a wilted spinach salad with bacon bits and roasted pine nuts. Of course, we weren’t the only ones to invite him over—probably half the families on the island had the same idea—but we were the first. I’d been chair of the committee that brought him here, so I had an advantage. Plus, that was me standing out there in the cold to greet him when he drove off the ferry in an old Volvo wagon the color of jack cheese.

  He’d begged off that first night—too much to do, he’d said, what with unpacking and all, and that was understandable, though I really did fail to appreciate why he wouldn’t accept my offer of help, especially in the absence of a wife or children or any sort of family, if you discount the two slope-shouldered Siamese cats staring out the front window of the car—but he agreed to come the following night. “Just name the time,” he said with a little click of his fingers, “and I’ll be there.”

  “We tend to eat early this time of year,” I said, trying not to make my voice sound too apologetic. We were standing on the porch of the house he was seeing for the first time and I’d just pushed open the door for him and handed him the key. There was a breeze out of the northeast, bitter as the salt smell it carried. The cats mewed in unison from the confines of the car, which sat in the driveway, sagging under its load. I was thinking of the city, how they ate at all hours there, and trying to balance Wyatt’s needs—he was a bear if he didn’t get fed—with what my mother, when she was alive, used to call etiquette.

  “How early?” He lifted a pair of eyebrows thick as spruce cuttings.

  “Oh, I don’t know—would four-thirty be all right?” He frowned then and I added quickly, “For cocktails, that is. Dinner can always wait.”

  Whether he was put out or not, I’ll say this for him: he was prompt. There he was rapping at the door the next evening just as the light was fading from the sky and Venus brightening out over the water. He’d come at four-thirty on the dot and that showed consideration on his part, but both Wyatt and I were surprised to say the least when we got a look at what he was wearing. I don’t know what we expected, not a tux and tails certainly, but he was a doctor after all, an educated man, and from the city too, and you’d think he’d have some notion of what it meant to accept an invitation. I don’t know how to put this politely so I’ll just say I was dumbfounded to see him standing there on the front porch dressed in the very same paint-spattered blue jeans, shapeless gray sweatshirt and pinched little baseball cap he’d been wearing the previous day (which I’d excused at the time because he was in the process of moving and nobody wears their Sunday finest for lugging boxes and hauling furniture, not that he had much—medical equipment, mainly—but then the Trumbull House was furnished. That was the whole point, wasn’t it?).

  Of course, I’m nothing if not adaptable, and I did manage to recover myself quickly enou
gh to give him as gracious a smile as I could muster under the circumstances and usher him in out of the cold. I didn’t have time to worry over the peculiar odor he was bringing in with him or where I could possibly seat him without having to think about the furniture, because there he was, stamping around in the anteroom and clapping his arms to his shoulders as if he’d walked twenty miles in an arctic blast instead of just kitty-corner across the street, and the moment had come for me to act the role of hostess—and Wyatt too. Or, in his case, host.

  Wyatt was looking chicken-necked in the white shirt and tie I’d made him put on, and his eyes dodged away from the doctor’s even as he took the man’s meaty big-knuckled hand in his own. “Pleased to meet you,” the doctor whispered so you could barely hear him and ran a hand through his beard. Did I mention he had a beard? A doctor with a beard? That set me back, I’ll tell you, but at least I’d seen him the previous day and this was Wyatt’s first exposure to him. (Not that there’s anything wrong with beards—half the lobstermen wear them. So does Wyatt, for that matter.)

  As planned, we got sociable over the scotch whiskey, the doctor sitting in the wooden rocker by the fire and Wyatt and I settling into the couch with its linen slipcovers and ecru pillows that are nothing but dirt magnets and why I didn’t go for a darker shade—or gray even, a nice charcoal gray—I’ll never know. Of course, I didn’t want to dominate the conversation but I’m afraid there were long stretches when I was pretty much resigned to listening to my own voice as I filled him in as best I could on our institutions, our likes and dislikes, and some of our more colorful types like Heddy Hastings, who at eighty-seven years old ignored everybody’s advice and named a whole litter of Pekinese puppies after her deceased siblings and then went around talking to them as if they were living, breathing people. The doctor didn’t seem surprised, or not particularly—I guess he’d seen just about everything in the city. He was more a listener than a talker, in any case, and Wyatt wasn’t much of a conversationalist unless he was sitting down at the fishermen’s shack with the Tucker brothers and some of the other old boys he’d grown up with, and that was a problem right from the start. But I’d given Wyatt a couple of prompts, and as he got up to refresh our drinks, he cut me off in the middle of a description of the sins and venalities of the summer people and blurted, “So you’re divorced then, is that it?”

  The doctor—he’d said right off Call me Austin, but the way my mother raised me I just couldn’t bring myself to address him as anything other than Doctor—held out his glass and gave us two words on the subject: “Never married.”

  “Really?” I said, trying to cover my surprise. I looked at him closely, looked at him in a whole new light. I thought of the two cats in the car—Siamese, no less—and made a leap. Was he gay, was that it? Because if he was he hadn’t mentioned a thing about it when he applied for the position, and though we didn’t have a whole lot of choice (there was one other applicant, a black woman from Burkina Faso who was still working toward her certification), I don’t know if we would have wanted a gay doctor. I tried to read Wyatt’s face, to see how he was taking it, but he turned his back to me as he measured out the scotch whiskey.

  “Wyatt and I’ve been married twenty-eight years now,” I said into the silence that had descended over the room, “and to answer your unasked question, no, we were never blessed with children.” Something came over me then, a kind of sadness that catches me unawares at the oddest times. My face felt like putty all of a sudden, as if it had just been molded from big wet globs of the stuff, and I thought for a minute I was going to start to cry. “It was me,” I told him, fighting to master my voice. “My tubes. They—but you’ll learn all that soon enough.” I drew in a deep breath to compose myself before turning the focus back on him. “What about you? Never found a . . . a person—you hit it off with?”

  He laughed and waved his hand as if he were swatting flies. “No, I don’t swing that way, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He dropped his eyes, a big overgrown man in dirty clothes who was probably just shy, that was all, and if I thought of Mary Ellen Burkhardt’s daughter Tanya, who’d recently come back to us after her divorce on the mainland, so much the worse. “I like women as much as the next man,” he said, but he never raised his eyes to look at me, just studied the pattern of the carpet as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world. And then—I did think this was a bit excessive—he laughed again, and I couldn’t help feeling it was at our expense. I mean, we may be provincial—how could we help but be, living out here a good twelve and a half miles from the coast with just five hundred year-round residents and one bar, one café, one church and a single supermarket that’s anything but super?—but we were still part of the modern world. Eileen McClatchey’s son, Gerald, was queer, as he insisted on calling himself, and we did have the summer people, after all.

  But then we were at the table, eating, and he never paused for grace or removed his cap, though I told myself not to be judgmental. He praised my cooking in the usual way—I’m known from one end of this island to the other for my lobster bisque, not to mention my pork roast with onion and peanut sauce—and then, as I’ve said, we wound up by the fire. I was trying to pinpoint the odor he gave off, something between perspiration, naphtha and a heap of old sweat socks left out in the rain, and I was just about to offer to do a load of wash for him as a way of getting him to open up, but he wasn’t the sort of man to open up, even when he was digesting. In fact, right then, with the crumbs on his lips and the platter of cranberry tarts still balanced on his stomach, he began, ever so softly, to snore.

  —

  It was a while before I saw him again, other than to wave at him when he passed by in his Volvo going God knows where, and in that time just about everybody we knew invited him to dinner (the better class, that is, the ones who gave two hoots whether a township functioned smoothly or even at all). I know the Caldwells had him over, Betsy Fike, John and Junie Jordan, all sorts of people. And if he wasn’t dining out, he could be found down at the Kettle at seven o’clock on the stroke, forking up a plate of fish and chips or deep-fried scallops, which are delicious, I admit it, but maybe not so beneficial for your heart health, as any doctor ought to know. At any rate, I doubted if he cooked for himself at all, not even to the extent of heating up a can of soup over the range or popping a frozen dinner in the microwave.

  Then there was the question of his office hours. Our agreement—the township was paying him $75,000 a year, plus the use of the Trumbull House, gratis—stipulated that he hold office hours, morning and afternoon, five days a week, and be available for house calls as needed. But Betsy Fike, whose wrist never really healed properly after her boating accident, went in to see him at ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning—in pain, real pain—and the door was locked and he never answered her knock. Even worse, when you could get in—and I had this from Fredericka Granger—he just sat there behind his desk, which even back then, right in the beginning, was a mess, heaped high with forms and papers and grease-stained sandwich wrappers, empty potato chip bags and the like, and you practically had to move heaven and earth to convince him to take you into the back room for an examination. And that was a mess too.

  I guess he’d been here six weeks or so by the time I decided to go in and see for myself. There was nothing wrong with me—Wyatt says I’m as healthy as a horse—but I invented something (female troubles, and though I’d turned forty-six and long since given in to the inevitable, I still wanted to see what he had to say about it, if that makes any sense). At any rate, I went in after lunch on one of those crusted-over March days when you think winter will never end, and took a seat in the deserted waiting room. The doctor didn’t have a nurse, so you just rang a bell and waited. I rang, took a seat and began leafing through the finger-worn magazines Dr. Braun had left behind when he lost his license in a prescription pill sting on the mainland and had to leave us.

  Dr. Murdbritter (yes, that’s right, i
t does sound Jewish and we batted that around like a shuttlecock before we made him the offer) wasn’t prompt at all, not this time. I sat there a good ten or fifteen minutes, listening for sounds from within, until I got up and rang again, twice, before resuming my seat. When he finally appeared, in a faintly grayish-looking white shirt with an open collar, no jacket, he looked as if he’d been asleep. His hair—have I mentioned his hair?—was as kinky as a poodle’s and it tended to jut up on one side and lie flat on the other, and so it was now, as if he’d just raised his head from the pillow. He looked old, or older than his documentation claimed (which was my age exactly—we were even born in the same month, six days apart) and I had to wonder about that. Had he fudged a bit there? And if so, what of his qualifications, not to mention previous experience?

  “Hello, Doctor,” I said, trying not to chirp, which I unfortunately find myself doing in such circumstances—running into people, that is, at the market or the gas station or the library or wherever. You’re chirping, Wyatt’ll say, and I’m forever trying to rein myself in.

  The doctor’s face was unreadable. He was squinting at me. He gave a little tug at his beard. “Mrs. McKenzie,” he said, his voice as flat as if he were reading from a phone book.

  “Call me Margaret,” I said, appending a little laugh. “After all, we have broken bread together—”

  He didn’t appear to have heard this—or if he did he chose to ignore it. This wouldn’t be a sociable visit, I could see that. “What seems to be the problem?” he asked, stepping back to hold the door open so that I could see through to his heaped-up desk, and beyond it, the examining room, which looked little better.