by Ann Beattie
“You’re humoring me.”
“It’s what I believe. You’ve got to understand, I don’t exactly idealize the union of marriage right now, with these sutures still dissolving and pinpricks of pain burning my gut like bees stinging me.”
“How are you doing?” he asked McCallum—as if he hadn’t just heard.
“Used to be a husband,” McCallum said. “Used to like my color TV. Even had a pet. A turtle. Did I tell you some neighbor came in and found the turtle under the bed and donated His Highness to the third-grade class? Used to have la vie normale. Used to be a devoted daddy.”
He waited for McCallum to continue talking about his son. He did not. He rose slightly, wincing in pain, then held the seat belt that crossed over his chest near his breastbone with his left hand as he sat upright, trying to ease some sudden pain, while looking through the windshield, taking in the budding trees, a tractor bumping along, plowing a field, the sinking sun. If it had been his right hand touching his upper chest on the left side, McCallum might have been pledging allegiance to those things. Pledging allegiance to daily life in Virginia, where the landscape, once they passed Warrenton, had begun to remind Marshall of New Hampshire. New Hampshire seemed far behind, farther than it was in actual miles, and he had to squint to bring back details of the roads he drove most days, narrowing his eyes to focus sharply on the remembered image of the ghostly dead elms crowding the road at the bend by Rimmer’s Stream, to envision the swaying light blinking yellow at the crossroads. The season hadn’t changed to almost-spring there; it was still winter, the light fading fast as evening came on, black ice a sheen that could surprise you on the roads.
To his right he saw a gun shop and shooting range that advertised discounts on fireworks. So many cars and trucks began to signal their turn into the parking lot that Marshall pulled into the left lane and slowed slightly to look, the way someone would decelerate to look at an accident: trucks were clustered in the lot, appearing as small as toys below the huge brown bear that loomed outside the store, its mouth opened in a red-tongued roar, its teeth the size of Roman candles. Beside the bear, he saw briefly as he glanced past McCallum, was a ride of some sort: a twirling disk with handles gripped by children, further dwarfed in the adult world by a thirty-foot bear. He thought again of McCallum’s son—whether seeing children brought him to McCallum’s mind, or whether, as it seemed, he’d written the boy off. Unless he asked, there would be no answer to that question, he could tell. He rolled up his window against the evening coolness, continued surveying the land. He thought that what he and Sonja might need was a change of scene, that they might explore the possibility of living elsewhere, someplace less harsh than New Hampshire, a place where spring came earlier. Though the problem didn’t have to do with long winters, but with her infatuation with Tony. Which she said had ended.
“If you pass another one of those places, we should get some fireworks, set them off in a field. Celebrate my being alive,” McCallum said.
“Do you think about your son?” he blurted out.
A moment’s delay before McCallum spoke. “Probably as much as you think about your wife.”
“I can’t stop thinking about her. The situation, really. Not her in particular.”
“Maybe that’s the problem,” McCallum said. “Maybe you’ve seen her as part of a situation, but you haven’t seen her in her own right. Good armchair-shrink speculation, don’t you think?”
“It might be true,” Marshall said.
“Might be, but what do I know?” He looked at Marshall. “How come you used to get so mad when I said you were my friend, now all of a sudden it’s just an accepted fact?”
“You persuaded me,” Marshall said. “With your many virtues.”
“Being?” McCallum said. “That the suggestion we hit the road came along at just the right time? Think things over yourself; see your brother; check out your sweetie.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“You told me how guilty you feel about her dropping out of school. Come on—all I said was that you were sweet on her.”
“Only in your mind.”
“Not true, but I won’t argue because backing down is another one of my many virtues.”
“Your wife thought you were pretty domineering,” Marshall said.
McCallum shrugged. “What’s this?” he said. “You playing nyaa-nyaa-nyaa all of a sudden? For a while, she liked the way I was,” he said. “Only thing I went too far with was keeping after her about getting the kid on some medicine, which she construed as my wanting to shoot tranquillizer darts in him like he was a charging rhino—and of course I hoped she’d abort the next one.”
“I can’t believe my bad timing, to call just when …”
“Bad timing, good timing, I don’t know,” McCallum said. “I sort of like the idea of her in jail. Excuse me: in the prison psychiatric ward.”
“I still don’t see how a person would do something like that as a response to another person’s sarcasm.”
“She didn’t like criticism. All you can do with people like that is back off from them or keep your self-respect by saying whatever you want to say, whether you cross them or not.”
“But you didn’t suspect? Nothing made you suspect she might be violent?”
“What are you asking? Did I see her eating Twinkies?”
“What?”
“Twinkies. The Twinkies defense. Some lawyer went into court and—”
“Oh yeah,” Marshall said.
Stores began to string together into larger rows to become shopping areas, the farmland disappearing, new roads poked into recently graded land. They were the warm-up act for the inevitable Wal-Mart that was sure to appear momentarily, the blunt-topped Taj Mahal rising out of the suburban blight, the long reflecting pool in front sensibly paved to provide convenient parking for thousands of cars. A palace that was not a monument to love, but to discounts. Sonja snuck off to Wal-Mart once or twice a year, he knew: not so much to save money as to take in the spectacle, bring back some souvenirs, though she stuffed the bags deep in the garbage so he wouldn’t find them. All the problematic things we do that we don’t care to discuss: where we shop; with whom we have an affair. Insult to injury: it had been Tony, an uninteresting control freak who could drop his pants and play tag with someone’s wife, but heaven help the person who was improper enough to stay too long at his house, his precious, private house. He’d invited them, then flipped out. Sonja had told him about it: that childish proprietariness not acceptable to her … though hell: she hadn’t objected to joining in to help enact his childish fantasies. And wait a minute: if everyone else was expected to be so proper, what about showing up at Evie’s funeral, making Sonja uncomfortable, returning to the house, sipping coffee and making small talk, being nice to old ladies who would have fainted if they’d known what he spent his days doing with Sonja, suggesting all along he was Marshall’s friend as much as hers. How long would it take for him to be in Sonja’s presence and not think of Tony? When Tony picked out their house—he had, really, and Sonja had either loved it or pretended to love it—that early on, he now thought, Tony must have been conspiring to have an affair with Sonja.
Traffic was heavier, and he looked for an excuse to pull off the road. He turned into a gas station just as “Yellow Submarine” started to play on the radio, a song dedicated to Ms. Blair (much giggling, as the dj asked the caller to announce the dedication herself) from the M.F.A. students.
“Submarine surfaces, you get gunned down at the Dakota,” McCallum said, loosening his seat belt and slowly, wincing, swinging one leg, then the other, onto the asphalt. He stood with more effort than Marshall expected, even given that people got stiff sitting for long periods in cars. Just when Marshall was about to help him, McCallum wavered to almost full height, leaning forward slightly, his hand on his side. He straightened his body as he walked toward the bathroom, suddenly swinging his arms and high-stepping as if he were doing a military drill, aw
are that Marshall was staring after him. A teenage boy in black leather, coming out of the bathroom, slowed down to take in the spectacle. McCallum marched on.
Paying for gas and a Diet Sprite, he saw McCallum exit the bathroom and walk to the car, neither marching nor walking normally, his legs rubbery. They were within sixty miles of Charlottesville, then it would be another seventy or so to Buena Vista. What was McCallum’s scenario? Were they going to check into a motel and call Cheryl, get together with her that night? It seemed particularly pointless to be seeing Cheryl, who meant so little to him, when everything with Sonja was up in the air. He had not mentioned the planned stop in Buena Vista to Sonja.
“Want me to get you something to drink?” he called to McCallum as he approached the car.
“Yeah, thanks,” McCallum said. “Ginger ale. Something to settle my stomach.”
He turned, sipping from the can of Sprite. Though you could see nothing but shadowy shapes inside the store from outside, from inside the view out was clear. As he waited in line, he thought about using the pay phone he’d seen near the ice machine, calling Sonja and telling her he loved her, he knew everything was going to be all right. He wasn’t sure everything was going to be all right, though, and the risk of having his voice ring hollow as he spoke made him decide against it. He paid with a dollar bill, got thirty cents change. Exiting, he looked through the glass and saw McCallum, head resting on his arm, which protruded from the open window, and was struck again by how strange it was to be travelling in this part of the country not with Sonja, but with McCallum. For a split second, he had wondered: What is that man doing in my car? What was he doing in the car himself? Had it been a good idea to leave, even though Sonja told him the trip would do him good, even though she’d insisted she wanted time alone? There wasn’t even the slightest possibility she’d get back together with Tony, was there?
He handed McCallum the Schweppes, wiping his fingertips on his jeans before turning on the ignition.
“Hey, man, I can take a turn driving,” McCallum said.
Marshall didn’t answer him. He pulled around a Jeep, coasted to a stop, then accelerated to get onto the highway. This was fine, he’d decided: all of it fine except perhaps the Cheryl Lanier part. What few words of consolation he could redundantly offer her could be said quickly; he intended to claim fatigue, leave the two of them together, wherever they might be, and tell McCallum to call the motel so he could pick him up when they’d finished talking. It irritated him more the farther south they got: Why was McCallum so intent on being granted forgiveness by a girl who had never even been his student? How guilty could he feel when, along with many other students who for one reason or another couldn’t hack it, she had decided to drop out of school for a while? McCallum hadn’t made it impossible for her to continue. Neither had he; the silly flirtation, the imagined romantic connection, the overreaction to the situation, however unpleasant it had been for everyone involved, were all partly the result of Cheryl’s own youthful inability to deal with problems. What was her motivation in agreeing to see them? Why had she responded to McCallum’s call, but not to his letter? It was going to be an effort to be kind, to pretend that how she was doing mattered.
A hawk flew over the highway, its large wings slanting a ragged shadow over the car. It took both of them so much by surprise, they ducked. McCallum snorted, an acknowledgment they’d been fooled, thinking a plane was about to crash into them—a snort to the Fates to indicate they knew that anything still might happen.
17
THE DECOR OF DOLLY’s was country eclectic: birds’ nests hanging on fishline dropped from the rafters, taxidermy treasures (a deer head with tinsel dripping from its antlers; a fox striding forward on a shelf that also held a fishbowl with two goldfish too large for the small container); license plates hung next to chintz curtains. There was an old jukebox with a cardboard sign: OUT OF ORDER SINCE ELVIS DIED. At eight o’clock it was an hour until closing.
Marshall had ordered a bowl of beef stew and a side order of cornbread. McCallum ordered next: pork chops, mashed potatoes, and collard greens. When the waitress asked if he wanted gravy on the pork chops, McCallum said, “Absolutely.”
“And on the potatoes?”
“You bet.”
“What would you like to drink with that?” the waitress said.
“Iced tea. But don’t forget a dollop of gravy on my collards.”
“You serious on that?” she asked, tilting her head skeptically.
“I’m a man who loves his gravy,” McCallum said.
“That so?” she asked Marshall, who was less than amused by McCallum’s high spirits. McCallum had also bought a Texaco cap, which he wore with the brim pulled low, so the waitress trusted the look in Marshall’s eyes more than McCallum’s.
“I’m betting you don’t want none of it in your tea, even if you do want everything on the plate to float.”
“That’s right,” McCallum called after her. “Let me have the gravy on the side with my tea.”
She turned, smiling as she hurried away.
“Lemon wedge can be right in it, but the gravy’s got to be on the side,” he said.
As he walked to the table, a spasm of pain had passed through McCallum, who’d reached out to steady himself on the coatrack. He’d washed down a pill the second the waitress brought the water. He kept them in his pants pocket. Marshall thought about it and decided that along with hating Band-Aids, men almost never carried medicine with them. When McCallum had emptied his pocket in the motel the night before, the pocket of treasures had contained the loose aspirin with codeine that Marshall was almost sure he was taking too often, a small compass, a wristwatch with half the band missing.
“What’s left to say to Cheryl Lanier?” Marshall said—the second time that day he’d asked, though he’d tried to fight the urge and not keep after McCallum. It was irrational; McCallum had never come up with a satisfactory answer, and Marshall was sure he wouldn’t. He thought, in the second after he spoke, that perhaps McCallum was still in some sort of shock; if he, himself, had been so physically wounded, maybe he’d have some unexplainable feelings too. “Never mind,” he said instantly, though McCallum had not rushed to answer.
Music started playing, not from the broken jukebox but from a cassette player on top of an old sewing machine: Jerry Lee Lewis, doing “Great Balls of Fire.” A man whose stomach had forced the waistband of his pants to his groin rose from a stool at the counter, held his hands above his head, and shimmied his hips, breaking into a wide grin as his friend walked back from the cassette player. He ducked when his friend lifted a hand to swat him, and their waitress, from behind the counter, pretended to be about to douse them with a pitcher of water. It was that way, with everybody at the back counter smiling and one taciturn family eating fried chicken at a table in the middle of the restaurant, when Cheryl Lanier leaned hard against the door and rushed into the restaurant. She was wearing the white ski parka. To Marshall’s surprise, she was also wearing the scarf he’d given her the night he picked her up hitchhiking. It was coiled around her throat, one end dangling in front, the other tossed over her shoulder. She loosened the scarf as she approached their booth, looking more puzzled than pleased—though why should she be surprised to see them?
Because McCallum had lied; he’d never told her Marshall was going to be there. That was why. Marshall knew it instantly. And too late.
“Like nuns,” McCallum said. “We travel in twos.”
“Wrong sex,” she said, after a long pause.
She took off the parka and hung it on the tall pole with coat hooks two booths away. On the other hooks hung the pink jacket of the little girl who was tapping a chicken wing on the edge of her plate and the parents’ denim jackets, lined in black-and-white-checked wool. “How are you?” the man said to Cheryl.
She knew them. She knew the waitress, too, who raised a serving spoon in greeting from behind the counter. It was Cheryl who had suggested this restaurant.
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“I’m fine. How are you?” Cheryl said, stopping at the table, her hand on top of the little girl’s chair.
“We’re about to sit here all night if she doesn’t eat her chicken. She’s had nothing but cornflakes for three days. Tell Cheryl Jean why you won’t eat nothing but cornflakes,” the man said.
The little girl squirmed in her seat. Marshall saw that her plate was almost untouched. The man’s plate was empty, except for bones, and his wife had almost finished her dinner. She reached across to her daughter’s plate and picked up a chicken breast, saying nothing to Cheryl in greeting, avoiding her husband’s eyes, saying to no one in particular, “All she eats is cornflakes. You might as well get used to it.”
“So how have things been back at the cloister?” Cheryl said, sliding in beside McCallum. As he slid sideways in the booth, he winced.
“Cheryl Jean, you tell Bobby to call me in the morning whether that part comes in or not,” the man called.
Cheryl nodded. The waitress came to the table and put a cup of coffee down in front of Cheryl. “Eating, hon?” she said.
“No thanks,” Cheryl said.
“You be in this Saturday?”
“One to nine,” Cheryl said.
If the waitress had any interest in who anyone was, she wasn’t letting on. Marshall had eaten only half his stew, but McCallum had finished. She cleared McCallum’s plate, asking if he wanted “gravy coffee.”
“One sugar cube, no milk, gravy on the side,” he said, smiling.
“We charge extra for gravy with coffee,” the waitress said. “Tell him,” she said to Cheryl.
“So,” Cheryl said. “What a surprise to get a call from you. I take it you’re headed down to Florida too, Marshall? Doesn’t sound bad.”
“Spring vacation. Ten glorious days on the road leading to the southernmost point of the U.S. of A. Going to stand at land’s end and have our pictures taken. Buy a coconut,” McCallum said.
“I’ve never been that far,” Cheryl said. “I went to Marathon to go fishing with one of my brothers a few years ago.”