This Time Might Be Different

by Elaine Ford

  After a few minutes she heard someone coming down the path, a man she’d never seen here before. He was smoking a cigar not much bigger than a cigarette, and he wore a faded blue work shirt, the sleeves rolled back to the upper arms. His arms swelled there, making her think of a snake that has swallowed something large. His hair was nut-brown, thinning. He must be thirty, at least.

  “I saw you from the window,” he said. He meant from the muffler factory up on the rise. “I noticed you because of your skirt.”

  Amy glanced down at her cotton skirt, which had a pattern of multicolored Xs and Os, like a tic-tac-toe game gone out of control. The material fell loosely around her bare calves.

  “I like that in a girl,” he said. “Wearing a skirt.” That was a lie. What he’d noticed was her hair—pale, lit by the sun, curling wispily on her thin shoulders. It made you want to stroke it the way you’d pet a young animal.

  The man’s green eyes, the intent way they studied her, unsettled Amy. Cigar ash fell near her sandal. She rolled her sandwich crusts into the paper bag and got up from the crate. So as not to have to pass by him, she walked away among weeds along the riverbank.

  “Hey,” he called, “I don’t bite.”

  Amy promised herself she would not go back to the river. The guy from the muffler factory made her nervous because he was so old, even though he was cute, or at least the girls at school would think so. But at lunchtime the next day she couldn’t face eating in the messy front office with Georgene, who would be leaning greedily over her tuna fish sandwich, the wax paper spread out on top of order blanks, crumbs stuck to her cheek. Anyway, Amy had as much right to be by the river as the muffler guy did.

  In the night it had rained, bringing out the melon smell in her crate. She imagined a ship landing on a tropical island. A beach with the shells of giant snails on it, pink and pearly and smooth as silk inside. Footsteps in the sand, not her own.

  She started to eat her sandwich and soon she was aware of the smoke of his cigar. He said, “We meet again.”

  She looked up at him. In the breeze off the river her skirt flapped around her calves. Her breasts swelled gently under a hideous blouse, out-of-date rayon or some fabric like that, heart-shaped imitation mother-of-pearl buttons, machine-made embroidery on the pressed collar. How old could she be? Sixteen? Seventeen?

  “You work over there?” she asked, lifting her head at the stained corrugated rear of the muffler factory.

  He explained that he was in shipping, not the greatest job, but it was okay for the time being. So long as he succeeded in keeping the supervisor off his back. “What about you?” he asked. She worked in a print shop, she said, filling out order slips and filing. Sometimes she made deliveries, which she liked, because it got her out of the shop. In moments, it seemed, a buzzer went off inside the muffler factory, and she watched him stroll up the hill. His head had a bald spot on the crown, she noticed.

  It became his habit to take his break outside when she sat on the riverbank, her skirt spread out around her, and they’d exchange a few words. One day he casually let slip that he’d done a tour in Vietnam. He wondered whether that would scare her off, almost hoped it would. But she wanted to hear about the war—Did you ever kill anybody? Were you ever afraid you were going to die?—more than he wanted to reveal. The next day he told her he’d spent some time in a VA hospital downstate. The sky was overcast, beginning to drizzle. She turned her head away, toward the river, and he saw droplets of rain caught in the fine-spun web of her hair. He imagined she was guessing where his scars might be.

  Another day he mentioned that he lived in a furnished room over a used clothing store. When she finally asked his name he considered lying—safer to make up a new one—but for some reason told the truth. Jack. “As in rabbit,” he said, mock-leering, and she didn’t quite get the joke. In a way he was glad she didn’t, but at the same time her innocence made him uneasy. He could tell she was attracted to him, and it had been a long time since a pretty girl opened herself to him. Amy, her name was.

  Back in the print shop she thought about how he’d looked standing near the crate, smiles crinkling the corners of his eyes. How would you describe the color of those eyes? She bought a notebook on her way home. She’d write down all the details she collected about him, to preserve them. Two and a half weeks she’d known him now. In her room after supper she opened the spiral-bound notebook and wrote in careful backhand: Things About Jack. Underneath, she wrote, Jack’s eyes. She thought for a while and then wrote, Green. Not transparent, like emeralds. Green like bright stones that you find at the beach, worn smooth by the waves, still wet from the sea.

  His hair is straight and medium brown, parted on the left side. You’d find it soft if you touched it.

  He always wears a blue work shirt.

  In fact, she guessed it was the same shirt, washed out at night with bar soap and hung over a bathtub to dry, because, along with the smell of the cigar, he gave off, very faintly, the aroma of sour washcloth. She could summon him at night by burying her face in her own washcloth.

  He was wounded in the war, but you can’t see any scars, and he doesn’t limp or anything.

  He hates working in the muffler factory.

  He has a brother in Los Angeles.

  Someday he’s going to raise Labrador retrievers. He likes the black ones.

  The brand of cigars he smokes is _________________. (On Monday she’d be sure to notice when he tore off the cellophane wrapper. Maybe save it and tape it into her notebook.)

  But Monday he didn’t appear. She couldn’t even find any of his old cigar wrappers amid the rubbish near the crate. Bite by tiny bite she ate her sandwich, telling herself that something had held up his break. Probably the mean supervisor chewing him out. By the time she finished her lunch she’d hear his work boots hurrying down the path so as not to miss her. She threw the crusts to a gull and turned toward the factory. Maybe he’d be at a window and call to her or wave. Nobody there, though, no sign of life at all. She waited, watching the gull gobble the crusts, then poke hopefully at a fast-food wrapper. At last the buzzer sounded, the end of break.

  She thought he might be sick, stricken by a summer cold or the flu. He’d be all alone in his hot little furnished room over the used clothing store, too sick to go out and buy food. He could be too weak to dial the emergency number. Maybe he didn’t even have a telephone.

  He didn’t appear on Tuesday, either. On Wednesday, she worked up enough courage to go right into the front door of the factory. In the big open area stacked with boxes, a man in a jumpsuit was riding around on a forklift. Over the noise of the machine she asked him if he knew somebody named Jack who worked there. “Jack? What’s his other name?” Well, she wasn’t exactly sure. He gave her a quick amused look and directed her to a partitioned cubicle at the rear.

  Inside she found a woman wearing a blouse so tight the sleeves cut into her plump arms. When she finally got off the phone, Amy asked her about a person named Jack. “Jack?” Lazily she flipped through a card file and then said, “I find a Jack Gilley. That the one you mean?”

  Amy said she supposed so, and the woman told her he’d been terminated, as of the end of last week.

  “Terminated?” The word sounded awful to Amy. “Why?”

  The woman shrugged.

  “Do you have an address for him?”

  “We don’t give out that information,” she said, picking up the phone again.

  “But it’s important.”

  Over her eyeglasses the fat woman peered thoughtfully at Amy. “You in trouble, dear?”

  “Trouble?”

  The woman ripped a sheet off an order pad and scribbled down an address on the back. “You make sure he helps you out. Then, if you want my advice, you’ll tell him to get lost.”

  Four days after that, a Sunday, Amy dressed as if going to church so as to deceive he
r grandmother. She walked up State Street and across the old bridge, over to Exchange and Park and Center Street, up Center as far as Cobb. The whole way she was worried that he wouldn’t remember who she was. That he’d laugh at her the way the man in the jumpsuit had. That he’d be with somebody else. That he’d have moved to another apartment or away from Bangor altogether and left no forwarding address. Out of her purse she took the page from the order pad, though she’d read it so many times she knew it by heart. 11B Cobb.

  When she found, at 11 Cobb, a used clothing store, she felt a thump in her chest like a mallet blow. The store occupied the ground floor of a two-story frame structure, an ordinary building you could walk by every day and never notice. Hanging in the shop window were wrinkled suits and dresses with ragged hemlines, bravely trying to tempt passersby inside. Somebody’d left a donation of old clothes in the doorway—the bag had fallen over and was spilling slips and bras and rumpled dresses onto the sidewalk.

  Around at the back she found 11B. The name on the mailbox said Phipps, not Gilley, but she pressed the doorbell anyway. For ages there was no answer. A kid who was delivering Sunday papers, pushing them along the driveway in a rusty supermarket cart, stopped to stare at her as she waited. “Looking for somebody?” he called out to her. She turned away and pressed the bell again, but even after she heard the shopping cart’s wonky wheels scraping over the sidewalk on Cobb Street, the kid’s insolent voice echoed in her head: Looking for somebody?

  The sky, which had been a brilliant blue when she started out, was now clotted with low clouds, and she began to be chilly in her Sunday dress. The summer’s over, she thought in despair. She’d be back in school and . . . And then suddenly there he was at the door, a day’s growth of beard on his face, his soft hair unbrushed. He held not a cigar but a half-smoked cigarette in his hand.

  Christ, it’s the kid, he thought. The blue taffeta affair she wore made her look like she was playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes. “Hi, Amy,” he said, not very pleased to see her. The riverbank was one thing. A full-scale invasion of his place was another.

  “You stopped coming,” she said. She felt her face go red.

  “I don’t work there anymore.”

  “I know, I . . . ”

  He put his cigarette to his lips and inhaled. Now what? He considered telling her he was busy and shutting the door. He pictured her limping away in those ridiculous high-heeled shoes, puffy raw blisters forming on her feet. So instead he asked, “Do you want to come upstairs?”

  At his question she realized all at once what he must think, the reason she’d come here. “No,” she said, “that’s not what I want.” She wasn’t going to fling herself on him. She’d die of misery first.

  She backed off the stoop and ran up the driveway and along the uneven sidewalk, half stumbling, and then she heard footsteps behind her, and she knew he was coming after her. At the corner she had to stop, halted by traffic, and when he caught up to her he grabbed her arm. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked, panting. His fingers tightened on her upper arm, and it occurred to her that she didn’t know him at all.

  “I made a mistake,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She hated herself for whimpering. She needed to get a tissue out of her purse, but his fingers held her. “Please let me go,” she said, and when he released her she fumbled inside the purse and several coins and pens and a lipstick fell out and went bouncing onto the pavement. He made no move to pick them up. He just waited while she wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

  “You’re acting like an idiot,” he told her, and she answered, “I know it,” and hiccupped. “Why don’t you come on back,” he said.

  She followed him along Cobb Street, stumbling a little in her heels as she tried to keep up with him, forgetting all about the objects she’d left on the sidewalk.

  The steps were dark, narrow, unswept, sagging a little under their feet. She smelled mildew and stale smoke. Inside his apartment he ordered her to sit and she obeyed, pulling a chair up to bare Formica. She didn’t want to look at the bed, on which was a tangle of yellowish sheets. While he did something at the stove she fixed her eyes on an electric guitar propped against a wall.

  “You can let go of your purse,” he said, placing a mug of coffee in front of her. “I’m not going to steal it.”

  She realized she’d been clutching the purse so hard the black grosgrain had moist smeary spots from her palm. She set it on the table, the damp side down, and carefully lifted the mug with both hands. Her fingers were trembling.

  But he wasn’t watching her, he was digging into his cornflakes. She must have interrupted his breakfast. The cereal looked totally soggy by now, and he was going to punish her by ignoring her. She didn’t know how much of the acrid coffee she was going to be able to put on an empty stomach, but she had to keep her hands clamped on the cup so they wouldn’t shake. After some minutes, desperate for something to say, she asked, “Do you play?”

  “Play?” He turned the word around in his head, amused at the possibilities.

  “That,” she said, nodding at the dusty, ruby-red instrument.

  “No, not me.” He reached across the table for a matchbook, and she saw again how firmly muscled was his upper arm. “My brother left it behind when he moved to LA, and I’ve been lugging it from pillar to post ever since.” He tore off a match and rubbed it against the matchbook three or four times before it would light. “I don’t know why I bother. I doubt the thing’s worth more than a few bucks.”

  “What does he do in LA, your brother?” She thought about her spiral-bound notebook, how she’d be able to enter this information when she got home.

  Putting the match to his cigarette, he told her Lee’s idea had been to get into the film business, on the technical end. He knew something about lighting, used to do lighting for a band. Jack laughed and dragged on the cigarette. “Last I heard, though, he was working in a carwash. I don’t know how serious he was about the movie industry, as a matter of fact. I think it was just something Lee told people, an excuse to go to the West Coast.”

  Jack’s brother works in a carwash, she wrote in her head. No, cross that out. Jack’s brother plans to work in the film industry. His name is Lee.

  Jack leaned back in his chair and drew smoke into his lungs. The girl’s stiff dress stood away from her chest, so without even trying he was able to see the strap of her white bra, part of the cup. Her breast made him think of a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “Do?”

  “Now that you’re not working in the factory anymore.”

  Suddenly she was sure he was going to the West Coast, too. People did that all the time, just got into cars or vans or pickups and took off. The older brothers of people she knew in school. Her own mother, so long ago Amy had almost no memory of her. Mostly those people never came back.

  Jack didn’t say anything for a while, just went on drawing on the cigarette and blowing out the smoke. She looked at the mug he’d given her and saw that a duck carrying a red umbrella was painted on the side. Why would a duck need to carry an umbrella? she wondered.

  He got up from the table and tapped his cigarette ash on top of rinds and coffee grounds in the garbage pail. Why not tell her? She might be just a kid, but it wasn’t like anybody else gave a shit what he did. “The thing is,” he said, “the deal’s not signed, sealed, and delivered yet.”

  “I can keep a secret.”

  He looked at her innocent face, lightly freckled, without guile, and felt impelled to trust her. He told her about the piece of land out on Gooseneck Road, in Holland. Kind of swampy, but it had a little house on it. It would do all right. He found himself telling her about Panther, the perfect bitch, won best-of-breed at a show in western Massachusetts a couple of years ago. Only four years old and already’d whelped a couple of gorgeous litters, brought top prices.
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  Amy imagined him stroking Panther’s silky black coat, the dog’s tongue licking his fingers.

  “I’m going to pick her up next week, Wednesday or Thursday,” he said. “She’s at a kennel downstate.” He dropped the cigarette into the pail, and it sizzled against an orange rind. Before he knew what he was saying, he asked, “Why don’t you come along for the ride?”

  She’d have to cut school, which she’d never done in her life. She’d have to lie to her grandmother. “Okay,” she said.

  On a Sunday afternoon a couple of weeks later they were putting up bread and butter pickles, Amy and her grandmother. Amy hated being stuck in that dim and congested kitchen, the old linoleum so coated with damp from the boiling vinegar that her shoes kept sticking to it or skidding on it as she tried to maneuver around Gam’s bulk . . . while Jack, her lover, was out in the cool countryside cutting down trees to make space for his kennels, the muscles in his arms flexing as he manipulated saw or axe or winched out stumps. He could be pausing now for a cigarette. If she was with him, he could be lifting her skirt, touching her, his hands smelling of earth and spruce gum . . .

  One of the quart jars failed to seal. Impatiently Amy wiped mustard seeds off the rim and replaced the lid, returning the jar with a splash to the canner.

  “I’m not going to let you wreck your life,” Gam said, “over some pimply boy.”

  Right out of the blue, she said that. Well, Jack wasn’t pimply and he wasn’t a boy. Amy had already made love with him twice and felt the jagged row of stitches winding in the small of his back. She was certain she knew far more about such things than her grandmother ever had. “There isn’t any boy,” Amy said.

  “I’m not deaf and dumb, Amy.” Her grandmother wiped her hands on her apron.

  “I won’t wreck my life.”

  “When I was your age I had nothing.”

  “I know, Gam.” Of course she did, knew the story by heart. Hard times. Leaving the potato farm as a girl, traveling down to Bangor on her own and living in a room in a rich family’s house, scrubbing floors and washing dishes to pay part of her rent. Humiliating jobs that hardly paid enough to keep body and soul together, but at least she wasn’t trapped on those few acres of dirt, which produced more rocks than potatoes. Amy’d heard her grandmother’s story so many times she was sick of it.