This Time Might Be Different

by Elaine Ford

  “You don’t have to worry that I’ll reveal your secret,” he says. “I barely know anyone here.”

  I take another sip of tea and carefully replace the mug. “What do you think the poem means?” I ask. This is the method I use for dealing with my mother when I want to string her along. She always falls for it.

  “I think we have here someone sad. Someone who feels that no one cares about her.” From beside him on the couch he picks up a pack of Camels and digs one out and lights it. “Possibly she believes there’s no way to cure her unhappiness.”

  I hear myself saying, “What if there isn’t?” For a second I’m confused about whether I supposedly wrote the poem or not and whose story I’m in, exactly. “There’s always a way, Lynette, believe me.”

  I look at my boots, which have dried mud on the heels. He’s expecting me to spill my guts, but I don’t do that. I don’t show my belly, like a dog that’s too scared to fight. That’s when people take advantage. “Did you know Denny Haskell from somewhere?” I ask, just to be changing the subject.

  John Scarano smiles, rubbing his pot-holed face. “Why would you think that?”

  “Why else would you come here?”

  “I picked the town on a map, because I wanted to be near the water. This was the place I could afford.” He begins to tell me about the book he’s working on, how slow it’s going, how he’d hoped the spare winter landscape would get him on track. He’d counted on having a first draft done by now, but he’s plodding in circles, making little headway. I watch him drag on the Camel, rub it out in a saucer, start another.

  His last book didn’t sell, he says, problems with distribution, and the Times reviewer must have had a grudge against him for some reason. His editor doesn’t return his phone calls. He’s low on cash, has about run through his puny advance. And then there’s the money he has to pay his wife . . .

  “You have a wife?”

  “It seems to make her happy to make me unhappy.”

  I gaze at his naked freckled arms, feeling a little sorry for him, against my better judgment.

  “Sometimes,” he says, “I’ve had thoughts like the girl who wrote the note: how much easier it would be simply to give up. Yes, let them regret all their sins of omission and commission after you’ve gone, after it’s too late. There’s a certain grim pleasure in that notion, which I understand very well. But you can’t give up, Lynette. It’s your duty, your duty, not to let the goddamn bastards win.”

  Pinching the cigarette between thumb and forefinger, he looks at me so hard that a laser beam shoots out of his colorless eyes, curves around the universe a million times faster than the speed of light, and in almost the same instant nails him in the back. His body twitches when it hits.

  “Well,” I tell him, “my mother’s expecting me home.”

  “Come any time you like. I mean it.” He puts out the butt and goes to the kitchenette for my jacket. Surprising myself, I slip the ivory carving into my jeans pocket.

  Up in my room, I lock the door and turn on the radio, which is tuned to Lucky 99: One Hundred Percent Country, a station my mother detests. I pull the carving out of my pocket and examine it. It’s just the right size to fit neatly into my palm, caramel-smooth on the underside. The design is of a pony half caught in a web, and on the web a spider waits for its victim, ready to pounce.

  “Lynette!” my mother yells up the stairs. “The laundry! You didn’t forget about the bathroom, did you? Where’d you go off to, anyway?” but I don’t pay any attention. I run my finger over the old ivory with its hairline cracks, trace the intricate web, feel the pony’s plump breast and muzzle and the curls of his mane, the double bump of the spider’s body.

  The pony doesn’t look at all worried about the fix he’s in. Maybe he hasn’t figured out yet what the spider has in store for him.

  “Lynette, are you listening to me? Turn that thing down!”

  The next day I carry the carving to school tucked inside my bra. In the afternoon, curious to find out whether John Scarano is going to try to get it back from me, and, if so, how, I stop by Leonie’s. Sure enough, the writer is at the window table next to the pathetic collection of plants. Enjoying living dangerously, I bring my coffee to his table and drop my backpack onto the floor, drape my jacket over a chair back.

  But I’m not going to get to play cat and mouse, after all. Right away he tells me that after I left his place yesterday, he decided to walk into town for milk and cigarettes. While he was gone, trespassers entered the trailer.

  “You didn’t lock the door?”

  “It never occurred to me that would be necessary.”

  I feel the carving pressing hard against my breast. “What did they do?”

  “Took something.”

  “Something valuable?”

  “It might have kept me going for a few months, if I’d been willing to sell it.”

  “But you wouldn’t have?”

  “It was very old, museum quality, irreplaceable. A relic of happier days. Selling it . . . I’m not that close to the edge yet.”

  My underarms tickle. Something flutters in my crotch. If only John Scarano knew where his precious carving is right now.

  “Did you call the cops?”

  “Not yet. I’m not sure what to tell them. After I discovered the theft I remembered that I’d heard voices in the marsh when I was walking along the path, but I’d thought at the time it was gulls. Or ducks.” He smiles wanly. “That’s not much evidence to go on.” Behind him, the sun is sending a few weak rays into the storefront window.

  “There’s kids in this town with nothing better to do,” I say, “than break into camps and cottages and steal whatever they can find. Sometimes they wreck the place, too. They don’t care who they hurt, and the cops hardly ever catch them. What can you do?”

  He takes a deep, ragged breath. “What you can do, Lynette, is refuse to let them defeat you.”

  But he looks defeated already, and I feel a twinge of guilt. He begins to talk about The Awakening, which is buried unread in the depths of my backpack. The book report is due Thursday. “Edna Pontillier may have been a victim of society, and of her own desires,” he’s saying, “but that’s a work of fiction. In real life, there’s no such thing as tragic destiny. You don’t have to be a victim.”

  Who is he trying to convince, me or himself? He leans forward and lays his hand on my arm. “Are you all right?” he asks.

  On the far side of the room Leonie heaves her bulk into a chair and falls upon a wedge of strawberry chiffon pie as if it’s her last meal. Without answering his question, I hotfoot it out of there.

  It’s way after midnight and I’m lying under a pile of quilts and army blankets with the pony carving closed in my fist. I’m thinking about whether John Scarano has called the cops and whether they’d be numb enough to believe the tale about juvenile delinquents lurking in the marsh. The hole in the story is that the supposed thieves did not steal every blessed thing in the trailer and then trash it, the standard m.o. of the local punks. They’d have had plenty of time to do the job right, since from his place it’s two miles to town and two miles back—at least an hour on foot—plus whatever time it takes to pay for a quart of milk and a carton of cigarettes in the Kwik-Stop and chat with ditzy Krystal the checkout girl while she struggles to make the scanner scan. If the cops don’t buy the j.d.s, and they start asking questions about who else might have been around the trailer Sunday afternoon, then what? I don’t need the law bugging me again. But something tells me he hasn’t called the cops and isn’t going to. He’s more the type to decide the robbery must be his own fault in some way. I don’t know if that makes me feel better or not. Up here in my room, which is basically the attic, with slanting ceilings and wallboard nailed to the rafters, the wind sounds like it’s going to rip the roof off and pitch me onto the frozen mud in the yard.

 
; In the morning I have such a hard time waking up I feel like I’ve been drugged. It takes me forever to find a shirt that’s not too wrinkled and a pair of pants that will pass the dress code. Meanwhile my mother is shouting up the stairs that I’m going to be late and she can’t drive me to school because something’s wrong with the clutch, and bratty little twerp Jason is whining and carrying on, like always.

  It’s not until I’m halfway to school that I remember the ivory carving, which is still somewhere in my bedclothes. It’s sleeting, the wind is fierce, I’ve lost my gloves, and I haven’t done my math homework. Not my day. After school I consider going to Leonie’s. I know he’s there, bent on saving me from myself, but the hell with it, I’m not in the mood. I head on home.

  My mother’s in the kitchen cleaning the stove. She jerks her head out of the oven as soon as I open the back door, and right away I can tell something is up. “On the table,” she says. “I found it this morning when I was changing your sheets.”

  What was she doing changing my sheets? Every other damn week of the year she shoves them into my arms when I’m on my way up to the attic or just leaves them on a step. The carving looks ridiculously out of place on her ugly, cheap, stupid plastic tablecloth from Reny’s. “It’s mine,” I say.

  My mother rises, a Brillo in her hand, filthy soapy water dripping onto the newspaper she’s spread over the linoleum. There’s smudges of grease on her broad, bland face. All over again, I’m glad I take after my father. “You stole it, didn’t you?” she says.

  “No, I didn’t steal it. Somebody gave it to me.”

  “Please don’t lie to me, Lynette.” She’s about to begin crying now. “I can’t bear it.”

  “I’m telling you the truth.”

  “Who is this person, then?”

  “He lives over to the Haskell place, in the trailer.”

  “What?” she asks, pulling awkwardly at the tips of her rubber gloves. They are suctioned onto her sweaty hands. “Nobody lives there.”

  “Somebody does now. A writer.”

  “Why would he give you such a thing?”

  “Because he likes me,” I say. “I know that’s hard for you to believe.”

  “Oh, Lynette . . . ”

  I climb the steps to my room, the carving in hand. Whether she believes my story or not, she isn’t going to do a thing about it. The last thing she needs is another complication in her life.

  I keep expecting him to be at Leonie’s when I get there in the afternoons, that wool coat giving off its mildew smell, empty cups littering the table, his sparse hair eggbeatered by the wind. But he never is.

  Sitting there sipping my coffee, I think about what I’m going to do with the carving. I imagine myself hitching to Bangor, getting on a Trailways bus. There must be antique shops galore down in Boston. I’d have to convince them it was mine to sell, I know that much. I glance over at the retired naval officer, who’s dragging a great dirty handkerchief out of his pocket. I could tell them I inherited the carving from my grandfather, a retired naval officer, who picked it up in his travels in the Orient, and now I’m forced to part with it because (the old goat is hawking something up into the handkerchief) my mother has a bad lung disease, and my father took off with his pregnant girlfriend, and we’re living on AFDC and food stamps, and we have to have the money, we just have to.

  I can feel the piece of ivory in my bra, that poor pony never noticing the spider lying in wait.

  I picture John Scarano out in the trailer, the sour milk in the fridge, a mess of books stacked everywhere. He can’t stop worrying about the trespassers who snuck into the trailer while he was gone to buy cigarettes. He doesn’t know who they are, or why they have it in for him, or when they’ll strike again. If he leaves the trailer, they might do anything. Tear his books at their spines, smash his typewriter into a heap of rubble, let the wind scatter his papers among the cattails. He stares at the stains on the carpet squares and doesn’t remember they were already there when he rented the place from Denny Haskell. It was the trespassers who made those stains, he thinks now. Through the smeary windows of the trailer he looks past the marsh, out to the narrow gray strip of sea.

  Jason is hunched on the porch steps in a small patch of sunlight reading a comic book he’s read a million times before. Looks like Mom put him outside to get some “fresh air and exercise.” I run past him and heave my backpack onto the glider. “Mom says to tell you—” he begins, but I’ve spirited the bike down the steps and am on it and away before he gets a chance to finish.

  The marsh weeds are brittle with frost. I pound at the cold metal door until my hand is sore, but nobody answers. The door is locked. Shades are pulled down over all the windows.

  My plan was to get myself invited in and, while he’s fussing over the teakettle, slip the carving back among his things. Obviously, that’s not going to work out. In a pile of junk behind the trailer I find a cinderblock and lug it over to one of the windows so I can stand on it and peer beneath the shade. It’s too dark in there to see a thing. For some reason I feel kind of sick to my stomach.

  I’m weaving back down the rutted driveway, and a big black pickup turns off the road and barrels toward me, braking with so little room to spare that pebbles fly up and ping against my spokes. It’s Denny Haskell. He leaves the engine idling and gets out of the truck. He’s carrying a homemade For Rent sign and a hammer. Ignoring me, he goes over to a nearby popple tree. I watch him pick a nail out of his pocket and with three whacks attach the sign to the tree.

  “You happen to know where he went?” I ask Denny’s broad back. The imitation fur on his jacket collar and his scrawny neck and shaved head make me think of a turkey vulture, like you see pecking at squashed porcupines on the road.

  He studies his sign for a while, admiring its artistic merit, I guess, then turns and squints at me. Recognition slithers across his wattled face. He’s concluding that I must be related to them Braggs and wondering what I, a numb Bragg, would have to do with a writer, even a writer down-at-heels as this one. He grins. Obviously he’s not going to tell me anything, even if he knows. Denny Haskell is as mean with his words as he is with his money. “He didn’t mention any plans,” Denny says, climbing back into the pickup.

  “Are you sure?” I yell, but of course he can’t hear me. He revs the engine so that I get out of his way in a hurry.

  On my way home I turn off Market Street at Burger King and pedal over cobblestones down to the wharf. It’s deserted, no boats on the bay, not a soul in sight. I drop the bike, leaving its tires spinning, and walk out to the end of the dock. The tide is foaming, swirling around the barnacled pilings, smelling of seaweed and rotting fish. I reach inside my jacket and dig the ivory carving out of my bra. I look at it curled in my hand one last time. Then I hurl it as hard and far as I can into the water.

  IN THE MARROW

  In the john Amy filled her palms with the gritty soap powder and rubbed her hands together until the skin was about to come off. The ballpoint pens always leaked on her fingers, and the print on handbills and flyers stuck to her hands like blurred tattoos no matter how careful she was. Two minutes to twelve. Back in the front office she yanked open the humidity-swollen desk drawer and took out her lunch bag, praying Georgene wouldn’t find one more thing for her to do before she could escape.

  “Be back at twelve-thirty sharp,” Georgene said. She worried about the girl, felt she was her responsibility, one she hadn’t asked for. Amy’s grandmother thought she ate her lunch right here in the office, and Georgene had to cover for her when the old lady telephoned: “She just went in the bathroom, I’ll have her call you back.” Or “I had to send her over to State Street, rush job.” Georgene didn’t like to tell falsehoods, wasn’t good at it, feared getting caught.

  Amy pulled the jangling door shut behind her. She knew Georgene would turn on the radio and eat her sandwich at her desk. Georgen
e had been working here since before the Flood. Never got married, had no life except the print shop, and the Baptist Church, and the Thursday night card game with the “girls.” Amy would rather die than have a life like Georgene’s.

  Or Gapp’s. Her grandfather worked in the back where the presses were, fed paper into them, made sure they were oiled and aligned, fixed them when they jammed or broke down. When she was a kid, before she had to spend every summer in the print shop as a regular job, Amy thought operating the presses was exciting. She’d beg to go to work with Gapp, to hang around and watch. Magic the way the blank sheets leaped into one end of the machinery and flipped out all printed at the other, faster than your eye could follow. The sweating men tossed jokes above her head. “Remember that cute little blond girl worked here once?” they’d say. “Hair got caught in one of the presses and she came out scalped.”

  Now, though, Amy thought of Gapp as being chained to the machinery, a prisoner. He’d gone deaf from the din and did his work as if in a coma.

  Amy sprinted across Water Street, making a guy in a florist’s van jam on his brakes and swear at her, and cut between two factory buildings. The brick one had long ago been abandoned, birds flying in and out of the broken windows. The other, an auto muffler factory, was a metal prefab, corrugated iron streaked with rust.

  On the river side of the buildings the air felt different. Cool on her skin, and if she licked her arm she’d taste salt. She followed a rough dirt path down to the bank and sat on a crate that bore a peeling, weather-soaked label from Guatemala.

  Fumes from the factories and mills hung over the river. The water, scummy with oil and algae, sawdust and bits of straw, lapped against the bank. Gulls shrieked. Eating her sandwich, Amy watched a convoy of scows filled with gravel proceeding in a stately way down the river. She’d like to be riding on the tug, feeling the powerful engine rumble underneath her. Even better, she’d like to be on a really fast boat, heading far out to sea, the wind whipping her hair.