After they left the house, she took Tillie’s dull old kitchen scissors and calmly cut—and partly tore—up the blouse he’d liked, the sleeveless white cotton shell with eyelet. She’d kept it unwashed because it smelled of him, that spicy musk with the chemical taint—and it still did, as a snarl of scraps and buttons and hairy threads; twice she pulled it from the wastebasket to inhale it. She emptied her flask in the sink and threw it down Tillie’s back stairs, into the parking lot. Following, she kicked it, slid her foot on it, scratching and denting the silver before tossing it in a trash can. She retrieved it an hour later, filled it with water: no leaks. She wished she had the little donkey (she’d stored it at the A-frame, in her box of dissertation notes) so she could hammer it into dust.
The second day, there was a blare in the air and a weird edge around objects, as if the world were off-register. She didn’t get out of bed or open the red curtains. She slept with the snarl of shredded blouse under her pillow.
On the third day, thinking that a vast body of water would clear her head and allow her some perspective, she drove to the ocean. The beach was socked in with fog, but the sand was warm. Her mother always said that this was when you could get badly sunburned without knowing it. In her pedal pushers and T-shirt, Cress lay down on the old chenille spread Tillie had lent her and rolled up in it, covering even her head. She looked like any other homeless person sleeping in the sand. She wept until the warmth of the sun bled through and the thudding of the waves calmed her. She slept hard for an hour and woke up sweating. She stood, shook out the spread, and folded it.
A small crafts fair had set up along the boardwalk, and at a jeweler’s table Cress chose a ring, a silver band with a green stone, to symbolize her own new beginning, one hundred dollars. Only after she got it home to the sun porch did she see the small peridot was the exact pale green of his eyes and that a thin bezel encircling the stone was made of yellow gold. Worse, at night, the stone seemed darker, greener, and the gold more pronounced, which frightened her, made her feel unhinged. The next day she drove back, thirty-seven miles, to return or exchange the ring, but the little fair was gone. Afraid now even to look at the stone, she waded into the surf, holding her skirt. The water was cold and prickling, churning with sand and fine pebbles; only children scampered in and out without wetsuits. When the receding tide tugged hard at her shins, she slid the ring off her finger and flung it into a gathering wave.
* * *
Back at Braithway, there was a note from her mother, who’d stopped by and dropped off a letter from Sharon.
13 June 1982
Dear Cress,
I hope Mom and Dad deliver this letter intact! Did you check the seals?
How are you? Still enjoying wedding season? (Loved your last letter! So funny!) I hope all is well with the Dark and Handsome Woodsman. (Mom says you’re somewhat engaged!!! Is that true??? Details, please!)
I know that I’ve been nagging you to come to London, and Mom wrote that you’re waiting for your passport. If you haven’t already bought your ticket (and even if you have), I’m afraid I have to withdraw my invitation. For the last few months, my rebirthing process has been very intense, and this week I made it back to the moment of my birth, and before, as well. I recalled in perfect detail the darkness (or really a kind of gray-blue dimness) of the womb, and how it split open (remember—you and I were both C-sections!) as if the night sky had been slit and peeled back. Light poured in, along with enormous fuzzy shapes that bobbed and loomed over me. What a shock! No surprise I carried that trauma all my life. You go from the dark lull of the womb straight to blinding light … and MONSTERS! You can’t imagine how much better I feel having gone back with adult eyes and seen that those fuzzy giants were just nurses and a doctor and dumb old Dad in surgical caps and masks!!!
The whole basis of rebirthing is not only that you get to reenact the entire traumatic birth process, but you also get to go through a brand-new one, this time trauma-free! That’s what I did this week, and it was so amazing and mind-clearing. Unfortunately, according to my rebirthing counselor, for the transformation to really take hold, I need to stay away from my original toxic family, which—I regret that I have to say, and no offense—includes you. (Not that you yourself are toxic [although my life did take a huge turn for the worse the day you were born and knocked me off center stage] [!!!]) But that’s hardly your fault. Still, the old inherited family patterns are so strong and so deep, and the new ones are so fresh and fragile, that they really need time to get established. Please understand that it’s nothing personal. For years now, I’ve been desperate to find a way out from under Dad’s extreme narcissism and pathological stinginess, and Mom’s hysteria and control, so much of which I seem to have absorbed into my own personality. Hopefully, that will change now.
I wish you would consider rebirthing for yourself. I’m sure there are rebirthing clinics and therapists in L.A.—it’s a worldwide phenomenon. I can ask my counselor for referrals, if you’d like. It’ll free you up, make you much more your own person and much less a product of Mom and Dad, who are bloody neurotic, you know.
In the meantime, best of luck with the dark handsome affianced. I’ll let you know when I’m ready for a visit, but it might not be for a year—or longer, even!! (Though I’d never miss your wedding!) If you’ve already bought your ticket here, and you don’t want to visit England without seeing me, and you can’t get a refund, or can’t get the ticket credited toward some future adventure, let me know, and I’ll reimburse you whatever amount you’re out. This brings
Love,
Sharon
P.S. Don’t be mad at me!!!
P.P.S. Although I’m happy to hear about your life, I must ask you not to share any opinions you might have about mine. If you need a ticket refund, just say how much and I’ll send an international money order.
Cress hadn’t bought her ticket. She’d only shelled out thirty-five dollars for the passport fee, and she thought of making Sharon pay that—for slamming the door, blocking her exit at the worst possible moment.
* * *
“I might go to Tucson to visit my old drawing teacher,” Cress told Tillie and Edgar. “Then maybe on to Minneapolis to check out the road not taken.” She meant John Bird with his finished diss, his job at the Fed.
On the seventh day after Quinn’s call, twenty days since the last time she’d seen him, Cress kissed Tillie and Edgar as they left for work. She drank tea and read the newspaper at their dining room table until noon, and for an hour or so, she sat in a chair and watched cats gambol up and down Braithway Court. She rose and pulled the sheets off her bed and stuffed them into the washer. She packed the plaid suitcase, carried that and another box of her things to the Saab’s backseat—the trunk was still filled with the bearskin rug—and drove north.
She had to see him one more time. She had things to say, face-to-face, words formed from ashes and fury, from which there was no going back.
* * *
Although she had been there only once, she had no trouble finding the bleak subdivision or his uncharming tract home. His truck sat in the driveway. The lawn was dead. The lemon tree, a shaggy, asymmetrical hump, was overloaded with undersized fruit. The living room’s picture window reflected a metallic twilight sky, but she saw the television flicker within and shadowy human movements. He was in there with his wife, her teacups.
Cress drove down the block and turned into a cul-de-sac. Pulling to the curb, for want of a paper bag, she cupped her hands over her mouth to capture carbon dioxide.
He’s home, Sylvia has surely told her friends—she must have friends she talks to, at least one, someone she works with, possibly Mrs. Harvey herself.
Quinn’s back. Cress can hear her childlike tones. And he seems relieved.
Just a midlife crisis, after all. It started with his dad. Then, for the first time ever, he couldn’t find work. I went out and got a job, but it went against his masculine pride. Then Annette graduated and was going awa
y to college—so much change, it really knocked him for a loop. He did some dumb things. But he’s back now.
Cress pictures a small smile tugging at the corners of Sylvia’s pretty lips, a smile that means they are having sex. Always something he enjoyed. They enjoyed.
Sylvia will have to be careful, and not let her triumph show, especially around him. He won’t tolerate smugness. She’ll have to act as if nothing has happened, as if she bears no grudge. He won’t tolerate reproach, either. He certainly won’t like Sylvia to ever mention Cress.
What’s done is done, he’d say.
Sylvia will have to be more loving and attentive, and a little smarter, if possible, and more intellectually alive now, since that is what he gave up when he moved back home.
Cress imagined Sylvia leaving work, stopping in at Longs drugstore for toothpaste and mascara. She lingers, reading Redbook. Then, maybe, she picks up Harper’s Magazine. If the girl reads such brainy publications, Sylvia no doubt thinks, she should, too. But she is quickly bored. The Afghan War, Tanzania, the Bauhaus—must she really be conversant on these topics? Even he probably can’t locate Dar es Salaam on a map.
In one arena, there was no competition. Sylvia was not plain. She did not have stringy hair or a flat face and thin lips. It was not hard to imagine Quinn stroking Sylvia’s cheek. I missed your beautiful face.
Cress shook her head and twisted the key in the ignition, making a terrible grating noise: the engine was already running. She pulled away from the curb, turned around, and, passing his house again, drove out of the subdivision.
* * *
Don Darrington stood outside his little back house in Sawyer watching Shim paw at something in the grass. “You’re back,” he said.
“I don’t know for how long. Quinn dumped me over the phone. I came up to have it out with him.”
“Donna dumped me, too.”
“No!” Cress hummed and sympathized, and asked Don if she could stay at his place overnight.
“There’s only one bed, if you don’t mind.”
She took the plaid suitcase inside his converted garage. Then they walked over to the Sawyer Inn and drank bourbon. “After you left,” Don said, “Quinn hit the bars. He felt guilty about his kids. He couldn’t see his way clear.”
“Sorry about Donna,” said Cress.
Donna had met someone else, a pretty boy from L.A.: Orton Froelich’s nephew, twenty-two years old, who’d come up to his uncle’s ranch to kick cocaine. “Four hundred bucks a day, I heard,” said Don. “Up his nose.”
Scott Froelich had come into the Sawyer Inn when Donna was singing and she couldn’t stop staring. Don was there and saw it all. True, beauty of that sort was rare in Sawyer, and Donna’s capitulation was instant and public. Guys clapped Don on the back, muttered into his neck. Sorry, man. There’s the shits, bud. Too bad for you.
Donna invited the kid over to dinner, Don told Cress. “Like she had me over two years ago. You go thinking it’s a barbecue or dinner party, then realize that you’re the only guest. She grills steaks, pours good wine, sings to you.” Don smiled faintly. “Poor little cokehead had no choice in the matter.”
The worst thing, Don said, what killed him, was that he and Donna had been house-hunting the very day the Froelich kid showed up. Remember Ondine Streeter? She had a little rental property on the north fork. He and Donna had driven over to see if it was a place where they could live together. The house was far too small, given Donna’s accumulations. Still, how could she go from moving in with him to falling in love with Scott Froelich in less than eight hours?
“Falling in love may not be the most accurate term,” said Cress.
Don Dare had no way of knowing that, in three months, he’d meet a young pediatrician out climbing the Crags. They’d marry within the year, and she’d put him through law school. In five years, they’d build a Tuscan-style villa on a hill outside of Fresno where they’d raise four boys and Labradoodles.
* * *
“I need to talk to you,” she said.
“Where are you?”
“The Food King near your house.”
“Stay right there,” he said.
His truck pulled up alongside the Saab. He motioned her into the cab. He was in that same cotton-poly short-sleeved plaid shirt, but his beard was gone and he’d shaved his head. He looked like a convict or a penitent.
He smoothed his scalp. “My summer cut,” he said. “Like it?”
What did it matter if she liked it? And why were his eyes so merry? From her side of the bench seat, she caught his scent—he must have slapped on his cheap green slosh a minute ago. For her. As the shock of his baldness ebbed, ions fluffed and resettled. There it was, even now: the instant abatement of pain.
His lips seemed thicker, well shaped without his beard, redder, naked. “Very bad form to give someone the heave-ho over the phone,” she said. It came out like a joke.
“I have to try it at home,” he said. “After twenty-one years of marriage, I owe Sylvia a chance to make things right.”
“It’s killing me,” she said.
He slid an arm around her shoulder and drew her close. His face pressed against hers, his shaved jaw a novelty. “I thought I would never see you again,” he said into her temple. “I thought you were in England.” He kissed her brow, her cheek, and finally her mouth, right there in the Food King parking lot.
He shouldn’t say so, it wouldn’t do anybody any good, but he still loved her, he said, as much as he ever had; she was his favorite living thing.
She ran her hand over his shorn scalp, a fine springy velvet.
Twenty-One
She found an iron bedstead at the Sparkville swap meet, forty bucks, and an old wooden dining table for a desk, twenty-five. She paid a man to deliver them, fifteen, to Ondine Streeter’s rental on Dawkins Lane, eight miles up Noah Mountain Road. At the end of a long driveway, the small yellow house had a green metal roof and a dirt yard fenced in white planks and tunneled throughout with ground squirrel burrows. A path from the back gate led through a thicket of cottonwoods and willows to a swimming hole in the north fork of the Hapsaw. Noah Mountain’s massive, slaggy blue face stared in the kitchen window. She was ten miles down the road from Quinn’s old mountain home.
She drove to the Meadows and filled the Saab’s seats with her boxes of clothes, books, and research notes—no room, still, in the trunk. “Don’t spend the money I gave you on furniture,” her mother called from the new house as Cress loaded the Saab. “You’ll need it when you get tired of being number two.”
Now that they were renting out the A-frame on weekends, her parents saw the need for furniture more comfortable than the wicker love seat, the unyielding upstairs bed, both of which Don Dare hauled down to Cress in his truck.
At Beech Creek, Dalia said, “I shouldn’t take you back, you deserted me in the heat of battle, but I’m helpless in the face of a good waitress.”
* * *
“You should have let Quinn fester,” said Tillie. “He knew where to find you. Now he can have his cake and eat it, too.”
“That’s a meaningless cliché,” said Cress. “There is no cake. It’s not like that at all.”
“What is it like then?”
“Quinn’s not greedy. Or getting any pleasure from the situation. We’re all just exhausted and need time to recover.”
She was speaking for Sylvia as much as for herself and him.
“And then what?” said Tillie.
Cress closed her eyes. Pain lay in all directions, a black moat. Sooner or later, one (or more) of them would get up the courage and strength to plunge in and get away. “We’ll see,” she said.
* * *
His truck lumbered down the long dirt driveway; Cress knew by heart the engine’s eight-cylinder rumble, and Quinn’s schedule, which was the old one, based around Sylvia’s work. They swam in the Hapsaw’s waning north fork, stretched out in the sun on granite slabs, fingers and shins touching, restored to on
e another. He tapped her rib so she’d see the bobcat drinking at the river’s edge, its tasseled ears flickering, its tongue the pale pink of a powder puff. Another day, as they approached, a pair of red snakes slid off into the water, their movement synchronized, bend-to-bend. Cress was afraid to swim after that, disturbed by what lived underwater, unseen.
They drove to their far-flung taverns, a beer here, a beer there. They ate T-bones at the Murdock Grill and steak and eggs at the Koffee Kup in town. He ordered his meat charred raw. Trained by a stingy father, Cress chose the chicken or burger, but Quinn overrode her, insisted she at least have the ladies’ cut.
* * *
He took her partway up the Wanderwood Road to a berry patch. “My uncle Dalbert lived just down the way there. He raised sheep, and this one old ram would eat his way into these berry brambles and get stuck. Too stupid to back up, he’d bleat and bleat till one of us came to pull him out by his tail.”
With two gallons of blackberries, they decided on the spot to make jam—Quinn ran to the grocery in Sawyer for mason jars while she boiled and stirred. He took a jar of warm jam with him when he left—he’d fib about where it came from. Cress envied the jar, how it could enter his home, sit on a table in the middle of his family life. She wished she’d sunk something into the ink-dark semisolids: an eavesdropping bug, a tiny camera, a bomb to detonate at will.
* * *
In the Sawyer post office, she ran into Donna. “Cress! Great to see you. I heard you were back. Sorry I was such a hard-ass, but Norma really put the squeeze on me,” Donna said. “Come, let me buy you a doughnut.”
At the bakery, they sat on cheap metal folding chairs at an old cable-spool table. Above them hung the taxidermied head of a wild boar with a cigarette dangling rakishly between tooth and tusk. Donna swung her head around to see who was behind her: “That’s the old Sawyer backward glance—you never know who’s listening,” she said, keeping her voice low. “Quinn was out every night after you left. He stayed through all my sets. Drank the whole time. He was a wreck. He adores you. But he felt bad about his boy.”
Off Course Page 21