This Time Might Be Different

by Elaine Ford

  “Writer.”

  Broke writer, I figure. That, or crazy. Over by the glass case Leonie is hunched over like a troll, moving slices of spinach pie from one plate to another. Her limp cotton skirt dry-mops the floor.

  The man takes the piece of paper out of his coat pocket and unfolds it. The paper is lined, obviously torn out of a three-ringed notebook. It reads: You’ll cry for me but it will be too late, I’m heading out to cross the final gate. The handwriting could be anybody’s. “Did you write this?” he asks.

  “Not me,” I answer, passing the paper back to him.

  “Look,” he says. “I was walking behind you. I saw it blow into the hedge by the library. I thought it might be a homework paper you hadn’t turned in yet, and you’d have to do it over. I called after you, but you didn’t hear me. By the time I got the paper out of the hedge, you’d gone. Then I read it.”

  Intently he gazes at me. What he’s seeing is a gap-toothed fourteen-year-old, messy hair, cheap Kmart clothes. A girl without hope? Friendless? Suicidal?

  Mulling the situation over, I stir my coffee with a fork handle. If this writer has gotten it into his head that I’m planning on checking out, where might the idea carry him? The scenario could take an interesting turn, and God knows, things are pretty dull around here. “Maybe I wrote it,” I say, “and maybe I didn’t.”

  Before he knows what’s happening I grab my jacket and backpack and am out of there. No crowds to disappear into, no other shops open on this part of Market Street. Behind me I hear bells jangle as he leaves the café, and then the door slamming shut.

  I run across the street and down the sidewalk a few blocks and duck into the park. Leaves are off the bushes, trees bare, nowhere good to hide. So I make for the public toilet down by the pond, backpack bumping against my spine. Crows in the trees screech as I pass under. I’m sure he’s after me, determined to save me. I tear around the corner of the Ladies side of the cinderblock john and find the door in there chained shut.

  Now I hear his footsteps . . . not running . . . hesitant on the pavement. He must not’ve seen which way I went. In this dark place is a cold, sour stench of piss, and under my feet dirty ice. The footsteps stop. I’ve got a stitch in my side.

  Maybe thirty seconds pass. Then he moves on, in the direction of the rose garden, which will now be nothing but thorny canes stuck in mud hard as concrete. I smile.

  “I asked you to be home by four,” my mother says, “so you could watch Jason while I went to the dentist.”

  I drop my backpack on the kitchen floor and take a banana from the imitation-wood bowl on the counter.

  She watches me strip off the peel. “I had to take him with me,” she complains.

  So? Jason’s your kid, not mine. “Something came up,” I tell her.

  “What came up?”

  My mother has a blocky body and a pinched, sorrowful face. Two men have married and then left her. She and Jason have a different last name than mine. From snapshots my mother keeps in a drawer, I can tell that I take after my dad: same skinny frame, same frantic dark hair. His name is Nolan Bragg and he’s living down South with his current wife and a bunch of kids. Every once in a while a child-support check comes in the mail with an Edneyville, North Carolina, postmark on the envelope. No letter, just the check. I wouldn’t mind seeing my dad sometime, but not the wife or kids. One half-brother is plenty.

  “You’re not in some kind of trouble, are you?” my mother asks. Last summer I got caught lifting a silk teddy from a boutique. The cops just gave me a warning, first offense, but she never lets me forget it.

  “No, I’m not in any trouble,” I say, biting off a hunk of banana.

  “Then where were you, Lynette?”

  I’m certainly not going to tell her about the writer living in Haskell’s trailer, who has taken such a great interest in me. That will be information I’ll use in my own way, in my own good time. Before answering I chew slowly and swallow. “Pep Club rally.” My mother knows me so little she doesn’t get it: I wouldn’t be caught dead at a Pep Club rally.

  In the front room, I can hear the TV playing a Home Improvement rerun and Jason jumping on the furniture, doing Turbo Megazord Power Rangers sound effects. My mother rubs lotion into her hands. She’s got any number of allergies. Nerves, she claims. “I wish you’d called to let me know.”

  “I didn’t have any money for the pay phone.”

  Sighing, she says, “You better get started on your homework.”

  I pick up my backpack and climb the stairs to my frigid room under the eaves.

  A couple of times that week I spot the writer in his long wool overcoat: once in the Kwik-Stop convenience store buying cigarettes, another time near the high school just walking along the road. Apparently he doesn’t have a car. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s in Leonie’s in the afternoons, looking for me, but I’ll let him wait and wonder awhile before I go back there.

  Friday, sure enough, he’s sitting at a table by the window, next to a hairy cactus and some dusty, spiky plants in clay pots. Behind him there’s also a few geraniums straining against the glass in search of sunlight. Good luck. I shed my jacket and drop my backpack on a nearby table, pretending I don’t notice him, then pour myself a cup of coffee from the carafe. When I’m settled I open a book I picked up in the school library this afternoon, the thinnest one on the paperback rack. I have to do a book report for English on a novel “of my choice.” No sci-fi or fantasy allowed. What kind of choice is that? These rules tick me off.

  I slog through about four pages, in which nothing much is happening except for a man named Mr. Pontellier lighting a cigar, while the writer is over by the hairy cactus with his eyes boring into me. Finally he clears his throat and says, “One thing you should know. That’s not the title the author gave it.”

  Innocently I glance up to see who might be speaking.

  “Chopin’s publisher forced this title on her,” he says.

  I shut the book and look at the cover. The Awakening.

  “One of the countless stupidities in the long history of publishing,” he goes on. “It completely distorts the author’s intention.”

  A book called The Awakening could be about finding out that while you were asleep aliens turned you into a different person, with a brand-new reflection in the mirror. Or about opening your eyes one morning and noticing you’re on a weird and mysterious planet somewhere else in the universe. The picture on the cover tells you to forget that idea. It’s a painting of a stiff-backed, beaky-nosed woman wearing an old-fashioned long white dress. Her hair is braided into a bun. From her expression, my guess is that the story doesn’t have a happy ending, not that I necessarily buy happy endings.

  “It was originally titled A Solitary Soul,” the writer says.

  I’m beginning to have the feeling this book is not for me, no matter how short.

  “The novel has some wonderfully evocative passages.” Leaving a newspaper open on his table, he sits down at mine. “May I?” He reaches for the tattered paperback, and I hand it over. Eagerly he riffles through some pages, one or two of which threaten to fall out. “Listen to this: ‘The voice of the sea is seductive,’ ” he reads, “ ‘never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation . . . ’ ”

  A regular comes into the café, a retired naval officer who left his wits behind him on the ship. Leonie brings him his usual, a piece of pineapple upside-down cake, and the old man starts to devour it, muttering, bits of cake snagging in his yellow beard.

  “Do you like to read?” the writer asks.

  “Nothing much else to do around here in the winter.”

  “There are worse things than reading.”

  His skin is so pitted he must have had terrible acne once. I bet that’s why he became a writer,
shunned on account of his oozing zits. I know something about how that feels: I’m not the most popular girl in the ninth grade. Actually, I don’t give a rat’s ass what they think at school.

  “I was disappointed when you ran off the other day,” he says.

  “I had, you know, things to do.”

  He pats a pocket of his heavy wool coat. Obviously he craves a smoke, but the troll has a big sign on the wall warning you not to light up. You’ll turn into a frog or a stone. “I’ve been thinking about the message on the notebook paper,” he says.

  “I don’t know if that was a message.”

  “What was it, then?”

  The loony naval officer lurches out of his chair and stumbles toward the door. Sleigh bells crash behind him.

  So the writer will think I’m too shy or nervous to answer, I lower my head and shove the novel into my backpack. He gets up when I do, forgetting all about his newspaper.

  On Market Street he walks along with me, in the direction of my house, which is the opposite direction from Haskell’s trailer. From Market Street you can catch glimpses of the harbor at the cross streets. In the summer the bay is speckled with white sails and fishing boats. Now the water is granite-gray, so cold that if you fell in you’d die of hypothermia in minutes.

  A girl from my class, Terri Michaud, comes out of the Kwik-Stop and stares at us. Who can that guy be? she’s thinking. Not Lynette’s old man: them Braggs all look the same, wild black hair and a space between their front teeth you could drive a truck through.

  Terri Michaud is a geek. I don’t hang out with geeks. I’m not that desperate, even though my best friend moved to Lincoln last fall. Stinkin’ Lincoln, people call it. It’s a mill town, way up north of Bangor somewhere. Jen and her mom had to go live with relatives when her mom’s hours at Walmart kept getting cut. She couldn’t find another job.

  For now, at least, the writer has dropped the topic of the notebook paper and is asking me about myself, about my life. But I have no interest in describing my obnoxious little brother and mistake-prone mother and our junker of a car that’s held together with duct tape and the threatening letter that came yesterday from Bangor Hydro. I’m certain he doesn’t really want to hear about those things, either. So I just shrug and act mysterious. I’m a princess incognito, for all he knows.

  He’s quiet for a while, walking along beside me, his wool coat flapping around his legs. Then he’s telling me about Grand Isle, the summer colony in the Gulf of Mexico where The Awakening is set. Years ago, he says, he spent a semester as writer-in-residence at a college in New Orleans and made a point to visit the island. He remembers weather-beaten old houses hinting of secrets from the exotic Creole past. A picnic on the beach, wine and white cheese and oranges. Someone playing an accordion in the distance. The softness of the humid air, the lure of the sea. “ ‘The compellingly seductive sea,’ ” he recites dramatically, “ ‘pulling away from the sand with the moon-driven tide.’ ”

  Here it’s still frozen February. Beyond the defunct cannery, Market Street turns into Route 1A, a two-lane road with practically no shoulder to it, crusted with rock salt and gravel. If two trucks happened to pass you at the same time you’d have to dive into the ditch, and it’s awkward to keep pace with this guy. He’s taller than me and walks with a kind of lurch. Now he’s talking about his travels in various countries, the important writers he’s met. One man’s name I recognize and I’m sort of impressed. “Wasn’t he married to Marilyn Monroe?” I ask. “Did you get to meet her?” No such luck, by then she was dead and he was married to somebody else.

  Half a mile out of town, I stop at a mailbox. The driveway winds away from the road to a big Victorian amid oak trees. The house needs paint and numerous repairs and for somebody to take a chainsaw to the scrub that’s encroaching on the lawn. Politely I thank him for keeping me company.

  He tells me his name, John Scarano, and I tell him mine. Only my first name, though.

  “Are you famous?” I ask.

  “I did have a book that was nearly a best-seller once.”

  He looks up at the house, no doubt picturing me at a window in one of the turrets, gazing suicidally out to sea. His hand touches my shoulder. “Lynette, things are never as bleak as they seem,” he says.

  Without answering, I give him a mournful little smile and turn away. I have to admit I’m getting a charge out of being the heroine of the story he’s making up.

  He’s watching from the road as I walk up the drive and around to the rear of the house. No one lives here now, since Doc Whitley went into the nursing home. Behind the barn I cross a stubbled cornfield, fight my way through a patch of alders, and finally end up in the backyard of my family’s dinky bungalow.

  Sunday afternoon my mother wants me to do a load of laundry and after that clean the bathroom, including scrubbing the floor and the shower stall. She thinks work improves character, especially mine. While the wash is agitating in the basement, the machine generating enough noise to wake the dead, I ease out the kitchen door and lift the old bike down off the porch. In a second I’m aboard and weaving around the corner of the house. The bike pops in and out of gear with a mind of its own, the chain makes balky ratchety sounds, and the brakes are mushy. But the tires have, by some miracle, enough air to get me where I’m going.

  This bike, a Raleigh with a man’s crossbar, used to belong to my dad. He left it behind. I have a memory of him teaching me to ride a kid-size bike, running in back of me with his hand gripped on the seat and shouting “Go for it!” while I careened terrified and ecstatic down the pebbly driveway. My mother’s story, however, is that I was only eighteen months old when he took off with “that woman.” There aren’t any snapshots to disprove what she says, though the man I remember picking me out of the hedge when I smashed into it had curly black hair same as my dad’s. Since we aren’t on speaking terms with any of the Braggs—my mother says they’re all on his side —I don’t have anyone else to ask. Can it have been Jason’s father, not my own, that taught me to ride a bike? Hard to imagine, because he hated me, and he wasn’t around for very long.

  When I was nine I quit riding the kid bike. Jason won’t touch it because it’s pink and has no crossbar. I learned to ride my dad’s Raleigh all by myself.

  I pedal a mile on Route 1A, passing through town, which is silent as a tomb except for Delaney’s Pizza, the Kwik-Stop, and Burger King. Even Leonie’s isn’t open on Sundays. Another two miles and then I leave 1A and wobble along the rutted driveway, not much more than a path, that leads to Haskell’s trailer. It’s a foggy, drizzly day, and I’m soaked by the time I get there. In reasonable weather you’d be able to see the sea beyond the marsh. Not today, but you can smell the salt and decaying shellfish and hear the black ducks on the water, laughing like madmen.

  I lean the bike next to the trailer and knock on the door. When he answers he blinks in the light as if I’d turned over a rock he was under. “I don’t want to bother you, if you’re busy,” I say, my eyes cast downward at the flimsy aluminum step I’m standing on.

  “No, no, come in.”

  The trailer is in confusion, papers and books everywhere. On the dining table, a typewriter that doesn’t plug in—John Scarano is out of the Dark Ages—and disorderly heaps of typed pages. He must eat standing up. Unwashed dishes by the sink and, on the counter, boxes of cereal with their tops flapping open and stacks of soup cans and a giant economy-size bottle of Jim Beam. Stink of cigarette smoke.

  “You’re wet,” he says. “Let me find you a towel.” When he does, it’s slightly damp, and as musty as the rest of the place. Since he went to the trouble, I give my hair a few passes with it.

  In the kitchenette he drapes my jacket over a chair, then runs water into a kettle and puts it on the stove. He’s wearing a shirt that was white at one time but must have gotten washed in a load of coloreds at the laundromat. Sinewy freckled forearms and bo
ny elbows poke out of the rolled-up sleeves. The nakedness of his arms is almost embarrassing.

  We sit in the living-room part of the trailer waiting for the water to boil. There’s an oriental rug on the floor, a feeble attempt to cover the stained wall-to-wall carpet squares. Above the couch is an oil painting that for sure never belonged to Denny Haskell: slashes of red, purple, and gray, with blotches of pink. It makes me think of a slaughterhouse or a car crash. “What’s that a picture of?” I ask him.

  “It’s called Resurrection. The artist is quite well known.”

  Seems like a strange thing to name this painting. But I’ve never been to church except for the day my mother married Jason’s father, so what do I know?

  On the coffee table is the lined notebook paper. It’s wrinkled from being in his coat pocket. I assume he’s been studying it, fabricating my story out of the smeary ballpoint words. He looks at the paper and says, “I think you ought to tell me what this is all about, this little poem.”

  The kettle whistles, and I sit quietly while he makes tea out in the kitchenette. I notice that on the side table beside my chair is an odd carving, made of ivory looks like. It’s flattish, about the size of a pocket watch. There’s a carved spider on one corner. I remember seeing something like the carving in the window of an antique shop in town.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have any milk,” he says when he returns with two mugs. “It spoiled, and I never seem to remember to buy more.”

  The tea is hot and bitter. I take a small sip and put the mug on the side table next to the carving. He’s nervous, which is amusing, because he’s old—older than my dad, even. Why should he care whether my tea has milk in it or not?