by Elaine Ford
She laughed, a sound deep in her throat that made him wonder if she was a smoker, though she didn’t give off that cigarette stink. “Move on someplace else. I don’t expect much.”
“Why not?”
It was snowing harder now, and Marty turned the defroster up to max. Ahead in the slush he saw tracks where some vehicle had started to skid and nearly hit the curb. He slowed to a crawl. They passed the IGA, Merrill Furniture, Gold Star Cleaners, the Shop ’n Save, before she finally answered. “It’s easier that way.”
Marty thought maybe if he’d taken that view things would have been easier for him, too. He hunched forward to see, his nose practically touching the windshield, because the wipers weren’t doing their job. He should have had them replaced when he took the car in for an oil change last month. Tires were pretty bald, too. If FBS went belly up, what would he do himself? He couldn’t imagine giving news like that to Denia, especially now.
“Know what FBS stands for?” Teresa asked. Before he could explain about the Ficketts and how the name had faded from local memories not long after they decamped to Myrtle Beach, she said, “Forget benefits, suckers.”
Marty smiled, surprised that she’d think it up, even more surprised that she’d say it to him, her superior.
At McDonald’s he made the turn, realizing that now he was driving directly into the wind. He could barely see the road and thought it was fifty-fifty whether or not he would crash into something. Teresa sat silently beside him, her hands clasped loosely in her lap as if she were prepared to go with him into a ditch, over a cliff. Halfway up the hill he felt the car begin to slip. “I can’t do it,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
She was staring out her side window and didn’t say anything.
He reversed direction in a used car lot, then prayed he wasn’t going to go slamming into a truck on the way back down the hill. Luckily, at the yield sign no traffic was coming from the left. Driving back along High Street, he tried to figure out what to do. The motel next to Rosie’s Restaurant was $19.95 for a single, according to its sign, but he didn’t have that much cash on him, and he didn’t want to ask Teresa to pay for it. She probably had no more than a few bucks in change in her shabby purse. He wasn’t about to put it on MasterCard and have to explain to Denia when the bill came.
They passed the strip mall, and a quarter of a mile beyond it was FBS. Marty pulled into the parking lot. “There’s stuff in here we could use,” he said. “Camping stuff.”
She looked at him for a long time, her skin sallow under the security light, her hair bleached of all color. Marty waited for her to say that she didn’t want to stay here alone with him, wouldn’t feel right about it. He didn’t see what choice they had, but if necessary he’d try to come up with some other plan. “Would we get in trouble?” she asked.
At first he was confused about what she meant.
“Using their things.”
“We’ll put them all back the way we found them. Nobody’ll ever know.”
She nodded, trusting his word, and he turned off the engine. In their absence, no more than half an hour, enough snow had fallen that it was packed inside their shoes before they got to the front door. He unlocked it and they rushed inside so the alarm wouldn’t go off. Teresa stood close to him, unzipping her parka, shaking the snow from her hair. He felt his heart pulsing in scary little leaps. And then, he wasn’t sure how it happened, he was pulling her scrawny body against his own, as if she were a small injured animal that needed his protection, but at the same time he knew that he was the one most desperately in need.
August 1977
Denia watched membranes swirl like streamers around the clot in the toilet bowl. Four months she’d carried this one. No way was she was going to put herself through this nonsense ever again.
She went into the kitchen and opened a beer to kill the cramps and calm her nerves. Two pork chops lay draining on a paper towel on the counter. It was August and much too hot for such food, but the chops were all there’d been in the fridge, and even before the cramps started, she hadn’t had the energy to shop. She’d been exhausted for months, pouring all her strength into the child, and this was the way it ended.
Beer can in hand, Denia looked out the window and watched rain splash onto the concrete patio, collect in her whisky-barrel planters. The geraniums were going to drown.
She got a frying pan out of the cupboard and set it on the stove. It was an old pan, dented and discolored, which her mother had given her along with other discarded kitchen equipment five years ago, just before her wedding. Clueless little eighteen-year-old bride, who barely knew what a frying pan was for.
Marty had been thirty when they got married. Now his gums left pink on his toothbrush, and there were hairs on his pillow in the morning and clogging the shower drain. Corns on the soles of his smelly feet. In the beginning she’d been attracted to him in a crazy kind of way that was all mixed up with feeling sorry for him. He was clumsy and gentle, like a big old horse. She was pleased with herself for catching an older man, gratified she had that much power. He said, in the backseat of his car, he wasn’t going to do it unless they meant a lot to each other, and she swore to him that he meant everything to her. Was it a lie? Denia couldn’t really remember.
She’d never had sex with anyone before Marty, and she liked it: “giving herself to him” was the way she’d thought of it, as though she were making a sacrifice. Like a saint.
She threw the empty can in the trash and got another beer out of the fridge. Jesus, she felt wired, as if a zillion imps were jumping up and down inside her skin. The screaming meemies, her mother used to call it. In the vegetable compartment she found a bunch of broccoli, yellowing and wilted, but she didn’t care. Marty would eat anything she served without complaint, and she had no appetite herself. She scrubbed a couple of big new potatoes, put them in the potato baker on top of a burner, and turned the dial to medium.
Cutting the woody stalks off the broccoli, she thought about how in high school she devoured Bride Magazine and House Beautiful, imagining herself walking down the aisle in an ivory satin dress and, after a honeymoon cruise to Bermuda, entertaining in a sunroom with chintz-covered wicker furniture and pots of tulips on the coffee table.
She and Marty set a date, the Saturday after graduation. Then she began to wonder if she was doing the right thing. Marty only worked in a hardware store—assistant manager, big deal—and wasn’t all that good-looking. But the satin dress was half paid for, and everyone in school envied her diamond, and her best friend threw a surprise shower for her. She was afraid of the consequences if she broke it off, not quite sure what those consequences might be. Maybe she’d accepted too much love from Marty, owed him too much, to back out now. She still was a little in awe of him then, because of the twelve-year age difference. Why hadn’t it occurred to her to wonder what kind of thirty-year-old man marries an eighteen-year-old kid?
Denia put down the knife and dropped the stalks into the trash on top of the beer can.
She hadn’t known she’d stop liking the sex as soon as they were doing it on a mattress they’d bought at Merrill Furniture instead of in the backseat of his car, as soon as they could do it anytime they wanted and it was legal and expected and inevitable and her goddamn duty. And then she got pregnant, and the baby wound up flushed down the toilet, to be followed by four more bloody little disasters.
When she’d drained the second beer and opened another one, she heard him stamping his feet outside on the mat. “Hallooo,” he said, poking his head inside the door, greeting her in that cheerful clownish voice he liked to put on, too dumb to realize she’d stopped being amused by it years ago. She wanted him to see that something terrible had happened, something final, but instead he shut the door behind him and bent over to take off his rubbers.
What kind of man wears rubbers, for Crissake?
Still struggling with the lef
t one, he said, “Did you hear? Elvis died. Poor old guy. Forty-five years old.”
“What do I care about Elvis? That’s your generation, not mine.”
Finally he looked up at her, his thin hair wet and sticking out at absurd angles, his raincoat dripping onto the rag rug by the door. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I lost the baby.”
He crossed the kitchen and tried to put his arms around her, but she backed away.
“That was the last. I’m not going to try again.”
“I understand you feel that way now, but—”
“No, you don’t understand.” She was so itchy with nerves she could hardly see straight, and the beer was no help at all. “You never have understood one thing.”
“Denia,” he began, then closed his mouth. He returned to the kitchen door and hung his wet raincoat on a hook. His seersucker jacket, which he wore to work day in and day out all summer long, had become damp and wrinkled under the raincoat, making him look even nerdier than usual. “Did you call the doctor?” he asked.
“I did not call the doctor. This time around I’m going to deal with it myself.”
“If something’s left inside . . . Couldn’t it cause problems?”
Some obscure “problems” down the road were the least of her worries. She didn’t know how she was going to get through this week, this month, without going nuts. Why enrich some doctor for pretending to clear out what was already good and gone? “I’ll take my chances, thank you.”
Marty stood there awkwardly, watching her switch on the burner under the frying pan and pour Wesson oil into it. She pressed the chops into the paper towel, and when the oil was smoking, dropped the chops in. Oil spattered over the stovetop and sizzled on the potato baker. She saw him glance into the trash bin, notice the beer cans and rotting broccoli stalks. “Listen, Denia,” he said, “things will work out. You’ll see.”
Denia turned away from the stove, leaving the pan for him to tend to, if he chose. She didn’t give a shit one way or the other. Let the chops burn to a crisp, for all she cared. Let the whole house go up in smoke. As she strode by the counter on her way out of the room, her elbow knocked the handle of the knife she’d been using to cut broccoli. The knife went clattering to the floor, barely missing her as it fell. She didn’t stop to pick it up.
BUTTON, NEEDLE, THREAD
Quarter to six, time for a glass of wine, not a moment too soon. Anne lit the lamp just inside her apartment door and turned the deadbolt. Since early this morning she’d been meeting with students in individual conferences crammed between her classes, no time even to catch her breath. Lamb chop tonight? she wondered. She hung her raincoat in the closet. Or maybe she’d better have linguine instead. The sauce she’d fixed on Monday wasn’t getting any younger.
So comforting, after a rough day, to be home. Anne always felt thankful for the calm white walls, the fin de siècle fixtures with their frosted glass shades, the understated fluted moldings. On her way across the living room she noticed something lying on the carpet. A button. She bent to pick it up. Mother of pearl, shallowly concave, somewhat larger than a man’s shirt button, two small holes in the center. If she’d happened to step on it, the delicate object would have been crushed. Strange, she thought. She owned no clothing with buttons like that, and no one had visited here for days. Definitely not since she vacuumed last weekend.
Slightly puzzled, Anne left the button on the coffee table and went down the hall to the kitchen. The chop, she decided. She deserved it, after a day like this. Too many fragile psyches needing to be propped up, not nearly enough of her to go around. At the beginning of every semester she scheduled the conferences because she wanted to establish a bond with each student, in a warm climate of mutual trust. She’d never been willing to treat students as mere names on a list or bodies in a classroom. The opportunity to make personal connections with them and to nurture them in their work was what made teaching a pleasure. But maybe the conferences, and the clinging attachments they often engendered, weren’t really worth the emotional toll. The university did not pay her to be a therapist or a nanny.
No, she was just tired. In the morning she’d feel differently.
From an open bottle Anne poured herself a glass of cabernet, then surveyed the contents of the refrigerator. Maybe she’d have a cucumber salad with the lamb, and a baked potato. As she switched on the toaster oven, her cell phone on the counter began to trill.
“Hey,” he said heartily, too heartily.
Terry. Anne was not happy to hear from him. She’d broken off with him the month before, feeling defeated, finally, by the morass of his life—always late for appointments, forever in arrears on debts, chronically fifteen or twenty pounds overweight. Terry was a good person. Intelligent, patient, caring, attentive. But not, she’d come to believe, good for her.
“How are your students this semester?” he asked. “Any incipient Faulkners among them?”
“Not that I’ve noticed so far. Terry, I thought we agreed . . . ”
He coughed, and she pictured his dank basement apartment in Veazie. Everywhere piles of books with ruptured spines and musty, yellowing newspapers stacked on bare floorboards. His voice dropped. “I can’t help thinking about you,” he said.
“We’ve been all through—”
“Listen, you were absolutely right, I recognize that.” He sounded a little hoarse. “I just wanted to check in, find out how things are with you.”
She carried the phone to the window and looked out at the slate roof of the building next door. A pigeon landed on the gutter, mournful in the drizzle. “Do you have a cold?”
“I don’t know, I might be coming down with something. Anne, could we meet for a drink sometime . . . no obligation or anything . . . it seems a shame to act like strangers after all—”
“I’m really sorry,” she said gently. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.” It had been wrenching enough to extricate herself from his life once. She couldn’t face doing it again.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure, Terry.”
Anne hung up and turned off the cell. She felt exhausted. In her distraction she cooked the lamb chop at too high a temperature, setting the smoke alarm to shrieking.
Several weeks later, a Sunday, Anne and her friend Myra ate lunch at Siam Garden and afterward, because it was such a perfect fall day, drove out to an orchard in Winterport where you could pick your own apples. Anne didn’t arrive back at her apartment until late afternoon. At her desk she annotated half a dozen student stories. When she noticed she was hungry, she fixed herself a grilled cheese sandwich. Around nine she decided to watch a David Mamet film she’d recorded from cable earlier in the week. While the introductory credits were rolling she laid her hand on the sofa arm, and something sharp bit into her wrist.
Anne turned on the floor lamp. What she discovered poking out of the upholstery was an ordinary sewing needle, such as you’d buy at Walmart. She stared at the needle for a moment, then went into the bathroom to examine her wound in better light. A prick only, barely visible.
The movie, when Anne returned to it, quickly annoyed her. The two characters, professor and student, noisily projected at each other as if they were on a stage rather than alone in a classroom after hours. The situation seemed contrived, the direction overwrought.
In her bedroom she tuned in a choral music program on the radio, but wasn’t able to concentrate on it.
She could scarcely remember when she’d last mended something. Might the needle have been stuck in the sofa arm all that time without her noticing? It didn’t seem possible.
Anne closed the blinds, undressed, got into bed.
So she’d found a button of uncertain provenance on the Bokhara and a needle in the sofa arm. Not exactly earth-shaking events, she told herself, hoping to lull herself into sleep.
A min
or infection developed in the needle prick, but healed within a few days. The following Saturday, during her weekly once-over-lightly with the Dust Devil, Anne sucked the button and the needle from the glass-topped coffee table into the machine. Yet another of life’s unsolved mysteries, she thought, in the same category as her mother’s case of the disappearing teaspoons and the ephemeral odd sound in the front end of Anne’s ’02 Volvo, which none of the mechanics at the garage believed in.
That fall Anne served on several time-consuming committees in the department—these, plus the usual preparation and paper-grading for four courses, kept her busy enough. The leaves fell from the trees; she had to scrape frozen dew from her windshield before starting out for the campus; she began wearing her winter coat. Terry called once more, and she got off the phone as soon as she could.
She went out on a couple of dates. One was with an assistant professor of economics whose passion, she learned, was tuberous begonias—the other with a friend-of-a-friend, a urologist, whose notion of conversation was a blow-by-blow account of his custody battles. Neither connection would go anywhere, of course. Anne wasted no time grieving over the loss. Her loneliness she viewed as similar to a mild case of arthritis, an affliction you simply live with and do your best to ignore.
On a Friday in late October, as Anne was getting ready to leave her office after a long day, a student from her freshman lit course waylaid her, distressed over a low grade. Anne knew that Randi had recently, to her fundamentalist parents’ dismay, aborted a pregnancy. “Everything’s such a mess,” Randi wailed, shredding a Kleenex from the box on Anne’s desk. Anne spent half an hour soothing and encouraging the girl. Thick fog on the interstate made the trip home to Bangor slow going.