by Lily King
He’s perfect the way he is. She didn’t know if she’d said this out loud. She caressed the length of Walt’s body, her hands remembering how strong it once had been.
Tom stood at the door and spoke of dinner. Later it was Peter, urging her in to eat. But she was so tired. Maybe it was time for her to die, too. She was so very tired. She could hear them at the table, clattering, chattering. All their voices chittering along, while she sat on aching knees with her dead dog. I need a goddamn drink, she told Walt. If she’d married Brick they’d have a minibar in the bedroom.
Then they were all there, surrounding her with their platitudes and garlic breath. Tom had, of course, formulated a plan.
“He needs to be buried. We could call the vet or we could just bury him here.”
“Here?” Fran said, disgusted.
Tom shushed her. “Which would you like to do, Vida?”
“I just want to pat him.”
“We can have a little ceremony. I’m going to start digging a grave out back.”
“You can’t do that,” Fran screamed as if expecting this all along. “Not in my mother’s garden.”
“To the side, near the compost.”
“You’ll break all the roots of her lilacs. You will.”
“I won’t. I’ll be careful.”
Fran followed him out of the room. “It’s just a dog, Daddy.”
Vida wanted to scream at her, but Walt told her to not to bother.
In a few minutes she heard them in the back, rummaging through the shed, calling out to each other, laughing.
“That’s a snow shovel, you dingbat.”
“We should rig flashlights up on our foreheads like coal miners.”
“How much do you think grave diggers make an hour?”
They were all outside.
She placed Walt’s head carefully down on the carpet. Neither of her legs could hold her weight so she leaned on the bed, then the doorknob until she could get herself down the hallway alone. The bourbon in the pantry was gone.
It wasn’t that she needed a drink. It was the principle. It was not getting bossed around. She had a boss, a boss who’d put her on probation after sixteen years of indentured servitude. No one else was going to push her around—not tonight.
He would have hidden it somewhere. He was such a Yankee he wouldn’t have been able to throw it out. In the basement she groped around for the string that hung somewhere near the washing machine. She was always helplessly searching for the goddamn lights in this house. Her finger brushed it briefly, then it was gone again. “Fuck it,” she cried out. At that moment there was no one she wasn’t furious at. She was even pissed at Walt for dying on this lousy day. Finally she felt the soft twine in her hand and yanked. The string snapped off the chain, but the light was on. She went through every cupboard, every box, everywhere except the one place she guessed he’d put it. Finally, she had to look there, too.
She unzipped the garment bag, separated the flaps, and reached in. The dresses parted easily, as if they’d been expecting her. She ran her hand along the cardboard bottom. On one of their dates, probably that date at Emma’s he’d been going on about, Tom had read her what Fran had written for her mother’s funeral. It was a poem, and he kept it in his wallet. “She smelled like hyacinths and rain” was one of the lines. Vida remembered asking afterward if Fran had been reading T. S. Eliot at the time. She remembered, too, that this response had disappointed Tom and she didn’t understand what he could have expected. She’d never known Mary, had yet to meet Fran, and Tom himself was hardly more than a stranger who’d taken her out to dinner a few times. She didn’t know until now, until she’d buried her head in a rackful of Mary’s clothes, how accurate the description was.
But there was no bottle of bourbon.
She went back to the kitchen, trying not to think of poor Walt abandoned on the bedroom floor, to get Tom’s keys. The only place left was his car. She still had the goddamn string in her hand, and when she went to put it in the trash she saw it. Neck-down, nearly buried. She lifted it out. It had been drained and tossed out. Not such a skinflint after all.
She rummaged around for her old mushroom-colored raincoat beneath the pile on the hook and went out the back door. The padded right shoulder of the coat bobbed at her chin. She made straight for the half-dug grave.
Tom was in the hole up to his waist, crouched, spraying up dirt. Above the grave, they’d tied a flashlight to a tomato post. Fran stood beside the post, still shouting about roots. She stopped when Vida stepped into the flashlight’s faint outer ring.
The first thing Vida noticed when she stopped moving was that it was not raining. It hadn’t rained all day. The sky was clear and full of sharp stars. She had added this detail. In books it always rained while graves were being dug. Or perhaps it was Fran’s poem. Hyacinths and rain. She looked at Fran now, in her silver-studded jean jacket and fake fingernails. She hardly seemed capable of such a line.
Tom raised his head. He looked as if he’d been shoveling the dirt directly into his face.
A part of her wanted to laugh. Are you the First Clown or the Second, she might have said. But it was overruled by the anger that pinched and clawed with every molecule of her body. She didn’t know where to start.
Fran glanced at her with her usual disdain. “Your coat’s all twisted.”
“I don’t give a shit, Fran.”
She’d been so good up until now, but she was done being good, trying to squeeze into the little box they wanted to keep her in.
Tom leapt out of the hole as if she were holding a gun.
“Get the fuck away from me!” She remembered Helen on stage a few weeks ago, hollering, throwing pots. It felt great. It felt grand, stepping out of character in front of them all.
“Vida, come here. You’re upset.” He was reaching his arms out for her, arms that he’d withheld for so long now, tucking them tight under his body in bed in case they tried to wander. She wished she could chop them off.
“You fucking touch me I’ll kill you.”
She was aware now of Stuart, Peter, and Caleb staring at her from across the grave. Caleb had been crying. But Stuart and Peter had obviously been having a mud fight; their clothes were covered in splats of dirt. They had played like insensitive beasts while a grave was being dug.
What was her point? What had she come out to say? They were clustered together now, bewildered together at the edge of Walt’s grave, this family she did not belong to. She swung back toward the house. Her bag was by the front door. Keys on the hook. It was so simple to leave. She’d never been able to leave Peter before, never let herself fantasize, even momentarily, about leaving. But that feeling of wanting him away, that wretched feeling of him inside her, stuck to her, had always been there. Wanting to leave him was one of her most familiar but unrecognized impulses. Perhaps all these years of fearing she would kill him in her sleep were all about getting free of him. Exhilaration flooded her as she moved toward the front door. There was her car out on the road. She pressed her face against the front window. Had she known she would do this? Had she known it even when she issued her bewildering yes to Tom’s proposal? Had it been there all along, a tiny hopeful seed in the cold ground?
First stop would be O’Shea’s on the way out of town, where Tom had taken her once, back when he didn’t fuss about her having a drink. She hoped the same Irishman would be behind the counter. “What’ll do you?” he’d said. She loved that accent, right out of Dubliners, though he’d never read it, never even heard of Joyce, poor man.
Good-bye, Walt, she whispered and shut the front door. Her feet took her swiftly across the grass. She felt like one of Stuart’s girls, young and weightless, with nothing but mysteries ahead.
EIGHT
IN HISTORY CLASS PETER LIKED TO SIT IN THE BACK BESIDE THE WINDOW. From that angle he could see their old cottage and the playing field behind it, a patch of land he still considered his own backyard. That field looked now as it always did in winter: aband
oned, soggy, the lime lines ravaged, one goal having fallen in a storm. The cottage, with its tidy yellow clapboards and shimmering black shutters, sat on the knoll above. A light was on in Peter’s old room, a baby’s room now. Peter, too, had been a baby in that room. He had been every age in that room with the sloping ceiling and crooked windows and the closet with the old wallpaper he used to peel when he was angry. What had he been angry about then? He couldn’t remember anything more specific than a dull thudding wanting feeling. He thought her marriage to Tom would quell it and for a little while it had, but the sensation was back again. Only now he didn’t simply want another change; he wanted to step out of the very skin of his life and into another.
His mother hadn’t come home last night. Tom had driven him to school and they’d barely spoken. Peter guessed Fran had probably told her father and Stuart about the kissing. They wouldn’t want him around for much longer if his mother didn’t come back—or even if she did.
When Tom had pulled around the circle to the front door, he’d said, “If anyone asks,” and seemed unable to go on.
“I’ll just say she’s sick.”
“Good. Okay then. Have a good one.”
There had been something about shutting the door on his stepfather, leaving him to drive away alone, that seemed cruel. Peter had stood on the pavement dumb and inert for an awkwardly long time. He’d wanted to say something encouraging to bring color back into Tom’s gray skin. Peter didn’t know his mother this far out of her orbit. Anything could happen now. “You, too,” he offered, then let the door go, softly.
He’d forgotten, until he entered this classroom, that most of his grade had stopped speaking to him. They were working in small groups today, pretending to be landholders from 1749 working out their income and assets. Peter’s group was ignoring him. The truth was, even when he wasn’t being ignored, he didn’t contribute much to group work. Group work was just a way for teachers to get another free period. By this time of year Mr. Hathaway had given up the pretense of visiting each group, listening with fake interest, and moving on. Now he just worked at his desk, scratching out his illegible remarks at the bottom of each of their takehome tests from last week. When he looked up suddenly, Peter turned back to his group and nodded. Sarah, Kristina’s best friend, shot him a scowl and he had nowhere to put his eyes but back out the window.
Kristina had told her friends that he’d locked her in that bedroom in Scott Laraby’s house, that he’d tried to have sex with her. She even claimed to have cuts and bruises. Jason had not come to his defense.
He remembered how big that JV field used to seem to him, how when he was four or five he’d watch the games at dinnertime, kneeling backward on their couch, a plate of fish sticks balancing beside him. His mother hated the games out the window and always went to her room and shut the door. Those boys he had watched, so hard and tall and serious, with smoke rising off their skin into the cold fall air, were no older than he was now. He’d played on that field this fall, though only once, when a Fayer victory was certain, and even then only for a few minutes at a time. He’d never known what those boys he’d watched had known—the red steaming face, the burning chest, the ache to win, the ability, he saw now, to become with his others teammates one victorious organism. Looking at the field was making him feel worse than looking at his classmates ignoring him and just as he was about to turn back to them he noticed a mark at the far side of the field, a sort of gray-brown gash in the turf. Who would have dug a hole in the soggy grass? A dog? A fox? He thought of the military term “foxhole.” Was this what a foxhole really was?
“Mr. Avery, I’m sure your groupmates would appreciate those penetrating thoughts of yours,” Mr. Hathaway said, not even noticing how his group had shut him out of their conversation, which had quickly moved more than two centuries beyond the issues of 1749 landholding.
As soon as Mr. Hathaway’s attention fell away, Peter returned to the hole in the field. Now he couldn’t determine if it even was an indentation; at certain moments it seemed to be something on top of the grass. It was like that trompe l’oeil when the little girl’s shoulder becomes the witch’s hideous chin: first it was a hole, then it was a clump. It was part of the earth, part of the torn earth, he was certain, until it moved and then suddenly he no longer needed to see—he knew. The coat. The hair. It was his mother.
He was nearly to the door before Mr. Hathaway looked up.
“I’m going to throw up,” Peter said, capping his mouth.
“Gross!” a chorus of his enemies exclaimed before he shut the door on them all.
He took the absurdly curved and elaborate staircase three steps at a time.
“This is not the Indy Five Hundred,” a teacher called out above him, and he slowed obediently for a few seconds.
Now he was in the front hall. A portrait of his great-grandfather hung over the fireplace. A lot of good you can do me from up there, he thought, crossing over to the back staircase. The side door of the boiler room would be the quickest, most discreet route to the field.
Coming up those stairs at an erect and steady clip was the photography teacher. No sophomore had a free period this early in the morning, but Mrs. Dilworth simply said “Hello, Peter” under her breath. Her viewing room, Peter remembered, had a large picture window that framed the field. Was she coming up to report his mother to Mr. Howells?
He took hold of the thin banister and leapt, his feet touching down lightly only once before the bottom. The boiler room was to the right. When he was younger and his mother had an after-school meeting, he’d come down here with Lloyd and play slapjack at a little table he used to have in the corner. It was down here that you really felt the age and the immensity of the old house. It took three oil furnaces to heat the place. And the noise they made, the shuddering and screeching and hissing that went on all day and night. It was creepy alone—he’d never come down here without Lloyd. Jason had told him junior and senior couples snuck down here to make out. He wondered as he cut through the dim enormous room if somewhere in the shadows hands and mouths were momentarily suspended. He pushed on the bar of the far door and was outside, running now, not directly toward her but down the back driveway to the dirt road to their old place; then, making a wide circle around the house, trying to blend in with the pines, he followed the tree line around to the far side of the field. She was still there, still facedown, unmoving. He thought for the first time today about the way Walt’s body had fallen into the grave, like something that had never been alive at all.
“Mom!” He hadn’t meant to cry out; his voice an ugly squawk.
His knees were cold and soaked the minute he hit the ground. He rolled her over, half expecting, half sickly excited by the expectation of a gray face and blue lips. But it was just her, a little grass on her cheek. Since she never wore makeup there was no shock in the morning, nothing like seeing Jason’s mother at breakfast. She was breathing evenly.
“Ma,” he whispered, calmer now.
She continued sleeping. He looked toward school and was surprised how close it was when from that second-floor classroom she had seemed so far away. The mansion, so dark and cavernous from the inside, appeared to be all windows. How many people had seen, were watching him right now? They would send an ambulance. Mr. Howells would follow in his car, and at the hospital the examiner would tell them that she was simply inebriated.
“Get up now. C’mon, Ma. Get up.” He gave her a shove. It should have hurt—he’d shoved harder than he’d meant to and his wrist began to ache—but she was out.
He had so little time. The bell would ring in five minutes or so. He had to get her off this field. He pulled her up to sitting, her arms through the coat so thin and free of muscle. When had she become so small? When was the last time he’d put his arms around her or been so close to her face which hung contentedly now against her shoulder?
“Ma, please, let’s get out of here.”
He heard a voice and looked up with dread, his mind spi
nning an excuse, but it was just Mr. Mayhew at the circle, his back to Peter, calling his retriever Buckeye, who always wandered.
Peter hoisted his mother over his left shoulder. He expected her to be lighter, or at least more manageable. But she was so long. Her feet seemed to be dangling somewhere down by his ankles. He felt one of her shoes, then a few steps later the other, knock against him and fall off, but he couldn’t stop. By the tenth step there was no part of his body that didn’t ache—and how many more sets of ten were there to go? Hundreds, maybe thousands. And first there was a hill. He’d never, not even when he was a little kid, considered this incline up past the cottage as a hill. Even when he was three, he’d taken his sled to the real hill close to the main road. But now, with his mother draped across him like something he’d just shot in the woods, this patch of grass was his own Kilimanjaro—without the snows. Everything hurt: his ankles, the backs of his calves, every single muscle in each thigh, lower, middle, and upper back. And his neck—the whole weight of her seemed to be pressed against his neck. Even his lips hurt from how his teeth had clamped them shut from the inside. It was such a myth, the weight of a woman, the way in the movies men were always tossing women over their shoulders and running here and there with them. And what about that short story they’d read last year, the one about the boy and his father who go out hunting and the father dies and the boy has to carry him out of the frigging woods. Imagine how heavy a father would be. And that boy was only nine or ten. It was a bunch of bullshit, everything he’d been taught.
He made it to the top, but there was no reward in that because he had to keep moving, even more quickly now as he’d heard, though he didn’t know exactly when, the first bell, which meant everyone in school would be changing places, glancing out windows. What would they look like, he and his mother, from one of those windows? Would they be identifiable, if not as particular, familiar individuals then even as humans? Wouldn’t they seem more like a lurching beast, shifting its shadow among the pines, barely upright, staggering so slowly to the dirt road which thankfully sloped (he’d never noticed that incline before either) down to the faculty parking lot. He just had to hope none of the teachers had scheduled midmorning dentist’s appointments or concocted some other strategy to liberate themselves.