Off Course

by Michelle Huneven

  Sylvia looked at her for a long time, then stood and put the lamb in the oven, boiled the string beans, set the table.

  Cress was moved by her mother’s visit and sorry to be so frustrating. She choked down some lamb, ate a whole banana. She had to make many promises before her mother would leave: she promised to eat, to consider moving, to socialize, to raise her voice, to cut back on the wine. She promised to exercise, to try to forget Quinn, to revisit her dissertation. She accepted another check, for four hundred dollars, and never cashed it.

  When she got into her Camry, Sylvia Hartley latched her seat belt, then rolled down her window, motioning Cress close. “I just want to say, you were right,” she said, “the Meadows has been a mistake, from day one. What with Rick Garsh and what’s happened to you, I wish I’d never heard of the place.”

  Watching the Camry drive off, Cress made a promise to herself: to put on a better front from here on out, and keep her problems to herself.

  19 November 1983

  Dear Cress,

  Well. It has been a year and a half since I was born anew into this vale of tears, and things are looking up! Life in London continues apace. I have more students than is ideal and am also teaching pedagogy to the London Cello Instructors Association. I’m down to a size 10 again (I’m back in OA—it’s been like slogging through mud!!!). I’m getting restless and have been sniffing about for foreign teaching gigs—in China, Turkey (of course!—or haven’t I told you about Ibrahim?), and even grotty old L.A.

  I hear things are not so hot for you—and I’ve been given to understand that this is MY fault (source: Guess Who?). If I’d let you come to England to be properly distracted, I’m told, you’d be well over the hauntingly handsome husband-of-another by now, plus: Ph.D.’ed, AND gainfully employed at some well-compensated economic research post.

  Seriously, though, I hear that you have been very sad, and I would like to make amends to you for the part I did play in adding to that sadness: i.e., for not being available to you when I might’ve helped you out. I was careening about in my own oblivious way (i.e., head up arse), without thinking much or at all about the impact I might be having on you or anyone else. I’m truly sorry for that, and I can say with confidence that I won’t ever be so impervious to you again.

  I HATE a rift, esp. between US!!! You are the one member of our family I can talk to … stand … adore. The one person on earth who knows what it was like being in a family with Those Two. I miss your letters and your news. If the alarms sounding across the pond are even the tiniest bit true, I’m also very worried about you, and would like to help in any way I can. I will happily buy you a ticket to my TLC, i.e., Thoroughly Lumpy Couch, or I can come and occupy yours—if my company might cheer and you will have me. Just say the word.

  This brings love,

  Your 144* pound sister,

  Sharon

  P.S. If you come, don’t worry about what it costs me. The Great Mother has offered to fund everything if I can just pry you out of your mountain cave. Don’t you think we should take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime offer???

  *Down from 187!!!

  A pale log building went up on the west side of Sawyer: a new bar, BOB’S BAR, the sign said. After a Rotary luncheon, Dalia, Cress, and Lisette decided to drive over for a look. They took separate cars to the unpaved parking lot. The owner himself, eponymous Bob, a square-headed, Hawaiian-shirted Visalia man, bought their first round. Beautiful women, he said, passing out the draft beers, were a boon for business.

  Only in the hustings with two better-looking women, Cress thought, would she ever be called beautiful. She sat facing the two new pool tables, the felt expanses unmarred, the triangles of candy-colored balls poised to explode. The new log walls looked wet, resinous, as if brushed with maple syrup.

  Dalia said, “Don’t look now, Cress, but your guy just came in.”

  She froze and didn’t turn. She hadn’t seen him for a hundred and seventy-four days. Her heart started slamming around her rib cage. She heated up. “Does he see me?”

  “I would say he most definitely sees you.”

  “Let him look,” she said.

  He would have spotted her Saab in the lot. Had he been looking for it, hoping to see it for a while now? Or had he turned in on a momentary impulse? Still, he had to park, get out, lock his truck, and walk inside: time enough to reconsider. She finished her beer. “Here I go,” she said.

  Dalia said, “Oh, don’t. You really shouldn’t.”

  “Oh no, Cress, no,” said Lisette.

  “I have to,” Cress said. “I can’t not.”

  Spine straight, blushing and trembling like a bride, she walked across the concrete floor, past the line of men drinking at the bar.

  “What took you so long?” he said.

  His voice crackled through her veins as through ice. “How’ve you been?” she whispered.

  “Good, good,” he said. “You?”

  “Not so good.”

  “You still know how to cook a pork chop?”

  Inexorably came the blear of amazement that he would catapult over his scruples and his wife’s trust and once more turn to her.

  “Leave first,” she said. “Give me a twenty-minute lead.”

  She didn’t want her friends to know how instantly she’d capitulated. As she walked back to them, their faces were upturned, like plates, saucers of light and hope. Cress pulled out her chair.

  “Look at you blushing,” said Lisette. “What did he say?”

  She felt like a drunk trying to appear sober. “He’s doing well.”

  “He’s leaving,” said Dalia.

  “Good,” Cress said. “Anybody else want another beer?”

  She bought the round and drank hers quickly. The noisy new room with its forlorn music and now-colliding pool balls was glazed in a rosy-amber light. Long before she’d planned to, Cress stood.

  “Oh don’t,” Dalia said. “Don’t. Let’s go out to dinner. My treat.”

  “It’s not what you think,” said Cress. “I’m going home.”

  “We know what you’re doing,” said Dalia.

  “Plain as day,” said Lisette. “You’re straining at the gate. About to burst.”

  Cressida toed the ground, sipped air. “I can’t not,” she said. “I have to.”

  “You should stop yourself,” said Dalia.

  “Don’t do it,” said Lisette. “Just say no.”

  * * *

  How easily the car steered. How light were her arms. The phone poles ticked past. Not today, guys. The pain had receded, coiled back to its depths. How soft were the darkening hills, how sweet the breeze.

  He met her in the hall, by the washer.

  She showed him the magazines, her name in print. He read three columns, right there in front of her. “If you can do this,” he said, “why are you still here?”

  “You have to ask?”

  In bed, they both wept; his wet cheeks glistened in the dark room. His beard was back, his hair long again. He’d gained weight, having stopped all cigarettes and all booze but beer. She went over his body, touching each scar, poked his new belly, stuck her nose up behind his ear, inhaled.

  “How is it at home?” she said.

  “Better, now that we’re back on the mountain.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “Exactly what you’re doing.”

  “Not exactly,” she said. He was there for the alleviation of pain. And she was still hoping to redeem what had been offered to her once, what seemed to sit there yet, waiting to be claimed, just out of reach.

  Twenty-Four

  She turned in whenever she saw his truck. He’d plant himself in her path and she couldn’t pass him up. She’d perch on the stool beside him, and sometimes before they had one drink, they’d leave—he was more careful now about being seen with her in town. Once she came into Bob’s Bar and he was talking to a man his own age, a trim tanned man in a blue sport shirt. The place was almost em
pty. She took her seat and waited while they continued their conversation. Quinn ignored her. She nursed a beer. His voice buzzed, but she couldn’t quite hear what he and the blue sport shirt were talking about: who was building what in town, maybe. Who got county contracts. The man ordered another beer for himself and one for Quinn. Cress got up to leave then, and Quinn’s hand shot out, touched her leg under the rim of the bar, and pushed her back into her seat.

  * * *

  In the Sawyer bakery on a crowded morning, the air hazed with coffee steam and vaporized grease from the doughnut fryer, he sat with Caleb and two other men at a coil table, while she and Donna occupied the next one. Neither brother looked at her. Leaving, he passed within inches without glancing down.

  “You might have at least raised an eyebrow,” she said later.

  “Half of Sawyer was in there watching,” he said. “To see what I’d do.”

  “Even so, you could’ve been polite and not acted like I didn’t exist.”

  “When you’re seeing a married man, you should expect that sort of thing.”

  He didn’t mean it the way it sounded. In fact, she understood: they had to be discreet; he had to keep up appearances so that this time Sylvia would think he was making a real effort to make their marriage work.

  * * *

  They drove slowly, pressed together, on the purgatorial grid of roads and orange groves. They sat in their familiar completeness and comfort in those small bars in far-flung places where a lurid canned sadness leaked from the jukeboxes and old men drank diligently till dinnertime, then came back to drink some more till bedtime.

  Quinn phoned and she met him down by the lake and drove with him to Bakersfield, where he looked at a job in a treeless new housing development. She read a novel in the car while he talked to the foreman. Afterward, they bought a bottle and rented a motel room. “Now, this really feels like adultery,” she said.

  Quinn winced, as she knew he would. “It’s not like that,” he said.

  “It’s exactly like that,” she said.

  “More like, I met the person I’m closest to twenty years after I handed my life over to someone else. When I’m not my own to give away.”

  “Oh, sure you are.” She had less patience now for his formulations. “People get divorced every day.”

  “People you know,” he said.

  The next time, he went to bid finish work for an office complex in Visalia.

  The hours together invigorated her. She learned to make use of this invigoration. She drove to L.A. for research. She sewed curtains, she read novels from the Sparkville public library, she wandered in the foothills, her morning walks lasting two or three hours. As the days passed, the effect of their last meeting wore off; she saddened and slowed; pain and the internal chatter built back up, quivering dark edges reappeared around objects, the telephone poles bled back into view. She spent afternoons in the barn again, in the cool trough, with a candle and wine, lying under the polka-dot comforter, counting backward, waking up to a leaping candle and radiant darkness.

  * * *

  He took a job in Redondo Beach and during the workweek stayed with his cousins there. Cress drove down to spend Wednesday nights with him at a motel. They ate at seafood restaurants, took walks on the sand. He’d told his cousins he had a weekly poker game in Glendale and drank too much beer to drive home. When she was leaving in the morning, he said, “Poker again next week?”

  Three more times in the next three weeks, they met in Redondo, and then the job was finished.

  * * *

  Cress’s body startled before she saw why: Sylvia Morrow was standing at the fish counter in Younts. She looked smaller than Cress remembered: a slight, petite woman in navy pants and a navy tunic—her work uniform. Her hair was dark and thick, a heavy pelt. Cress swiveled her own cart around and fled the width of the store, to the produce section, where she stood by the watermelons, four field boxes pushed together. Cress slapped a melon, the hollow smack satisfying, like the correct answer to a question. She wasn’t afraid of a fight; Sylvia was too reserved and timid for any loud accusations, name-calling, nail-clawing. But why not spare them both the pain and embarrassment of a meeting? Cress shoved melons aside to thump the ones below. She’d thump until she calmed down and was sure Sylvia was out of the store.

  A cart rolled up beside her. “Hello, Cress,” Sylvia said.

  The aisle was wide enough that their shopping carts fit side by side. Sylvia’s hair was weirdly massive and curled, the crimped mane of a country-and-western singer or a cocktail waitress with aspirations.

  “How are you?” Sylvia said.

  “Fine,” said Cress. “And you?”

  Sylvia must have noticed Cress staring, because her hand rose to a clump of curls by her face. “I just got my hair done. I hate how she rats it up so poufy. I always get in the shower the second I get home to wash out all the spray.”

  Stupefied, Cress nodded. Would they really stand here and talk hair like friends?

  Sylvia put a hand on Cress’s cart and left it, fingers curling slightly around the chrome. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you, Cress. So I’m glad we ran into each other. I wanted to say…” Sylvia glanced quickly into Cress’s face, then down. “Well, I hope you’re not staying around up here because you think Quinn’s going to leave me and marry you. Because that’s not going to happen, Cress. It never was, and it never will.” In her girlish tones twanged a wire of certainty. “Quinn and I are going to grow old together. We always were, and nothing’s changed. If he got your hopes up for something else, he shouldn’t of, and I’m sorry for that. I really am.”

  Cress kept her face still, even as her heart went wild. Sylvia’s self-possession was marvelous, but those clichés!

  Up ahead of them, symmetrical stacks of waxy purple and green cabbages bulged with veins. The misters went on, spraying them, and in that hissing, Cress missed some of what Sylvia was saying next. She heard “… miscarriage last month, but the doctor says we can start trying again next week.”

  So here was a real prisoners’ dilemma, Cress thought. Should I continue to nod and simper? Or should I now tell Sylvia about the day before yesterday at the Motor Inn? The bottle of bourbon? The hours in bed?

  But Quinn would never forgive her if she narc’ed.

  * * *

  “I’m glad she talked to you,” said Dalia. “Maybe now you can be done.”

  Cress hoped so too. She would like to be done. Done and gone. But when she saw Quinn’s truck at the Staghorn, she turned into the parking lot. His green eyes brightened at the sight of her; he was down at the end of the bar, where she’d met the yellow mother. His low voice sent a fast current through her system. He was hoping she’d come; he always felt better the moment he saw her warm, open face. Did she feel like a drive? A steak?

  They drove and ate, and drowsy from meat and liquor, Cress, who had been trying to ascertain if Sylvia had reported their encounter, said, “Sylvia sees me around, on the road. Does she ever say anything? What does she think?”

  “She thinks you have psychological problems.”

  “Oh my. I suppose I do. What do you think?”

  “I do wonder why you’re still here.”

  She saw then that they’d found a way to unite against her. That they’d agreed on a narrative: Quinn had made a mistake, opened a real can of worms. And now he was pursued by the mentally unstable.

  On a recent trip to Pasadena, Tillie and Cress had gone to see a movie where a spurned mistress—who’d spent only one night with a married man—stalks the man relentlessly, tries all sorts of shenanigans to get his attention, and eventually boils his family’s pet. Cress would never go a tenth that far, but her sympathies were definitely with the mistress, who was up against the blameless bland wife and family itself, that fortress of sanctified virtue. The pet boiler was truly deranged—but isn’t it often the fringe, unhinged person who acts out the anger of her cohort? The pet boiler, Cress felt, had struck a blow for thei
r kind. The discarded. The unchosen.

  She did have psychological problems, Cress would be the first to admit it: obsession, depression, loss of affect, anhedonia. And—not to be melodramatic here—she couldn’t quite locate herself anymore. She’d try to consult herself on matters large or small and she’d come up blank, except through the filter of him. She bought only the food that he might eat. When she shopped for clothes, she thought only in terms of his taste, or what she imagined his taste to be: lace at the neck, and tighter, tidier slacks. Upon entering any room full of men—a banquet, the magazine’s newsroom, a bar—not one pricked her interest, they could all have been chairs or lamps, since none of them was Quinn. Although Cress duly researched and wrote the assignments Silas gave her—she was too afraid of displeasing him and Tillie to fail—she had no real interest in the magazine work, the stories about art and commerce. The single story she did pitch—one about clearcutting in the Spearmint watershed and the war between local loggers and environmentalists—was dismissed on the spot. (“Write it for the Sierra Club newsletter,” Tillie said.) As for her dissertation—well, that was like a small handkerchief tied to a tree so far away Cress glimpsed its listless flutter intermittently, seasonally.

  A dissertation on art in the marketplace would do nothing to draw him nearer.

  She understood that he was no longer listing in her direction. He had found a way back into his old life. His grief, the sadness and fury that sent him to her, had subsided, leaving her stranded here in the middle of a pasture. She should get out. It was time. Past time. And she wanted out, she really did. At least part of her did. More and more, it seemed, she was in a civil war with herself, the side that had dug in versus the side that wanted out. The dug-in side was like a steel I-beam sunk deep in unconscious muck. The wanting-out side was like that sheep of his uncle’s, tangled deep in the brambles, bleating weakly for someone, anyone, to come and yank her free.

  * * *

  A motel in Reseda had thin, slippery sheets and hourly rates.

  “Don Dare’s in law school,” she told him.