by Lynne Hugo
Cora softened and smiled a small acknowledgment. “Yes,” she said. “You’re particularly nice not to use the word glowing,” she whispered. Then, in a normal tone, added, “I just want her to be happy, you know.”
“Hush,” Jolene said. “I know that and she does, too. And look how good our room looks.” Accordion-foldout wedding bells hung from the stark ceiling, white on white like Christine’s gown and veil, though Cora and Jolene had tried to soften the edginess with white crepe paper, artfully draped. The table decorations had been labored over, silk ivy and little pink silk flowers along with white candles, and silver glitter scattered beneath the centerpieces on the church’s linens. Every now and then the glitter winked like so many eyes in the candlelight. Outside, the sun was hardly beginning to set, but daylight was apparent only through the glass doors so the effect still worked just as Cora and Jolene planned.
Twenty feet away, near the doors, Marvin and Jolene’s stocky husband stood off to one side of the fellowship hall, surveying the scene. Each held a glass of beer. “What’s the matter with him?” Bob said. “Not religious, is he? What?” He nodded toward Alex who at that moment lit a cigarette, took a long drag, and then pinched it between his thumb and first two fingers pointing the ashy tip behind him. “Looks like a punk,” he added. His face twitched with a small gesture of disgust, though he tried to hide it by keeping his face turned toward Alex instead of Marvin. Bob was a kind man, usually tolerant enough to wait for people to show their hands directly to him, but the war ignited him like a flare. His son put it on the line every day while others trumped up ailments and excuses, pulling them out of their sleeves like so many cards.
“He is a punk,” Marvin said. “Don’t know what’s the matter with him, but it’s not religion. He’s no CO, even though I think he’d like to try that one on the Board. Someone must have tipped him that Samuels sees right through that CO crap. If you’re not a Quaker or 4F, you’re 1A. I’d like to have a talk with his father, only the SOB is six feet under, drank himself to death most likely. Thing that eats me is how all this ‘let’s get married’ stuff heats up after he gets his lottery number, and Christine don’t notice a connection. Thinks they’re in love.” He spread the last word over three sarcastic seconds.
“Not the way we did things, huh?” Bob was getting a hold on himself, folding anger inside his cotton affability. His plaid sports coat had been contributing to his sense of suffocation, and he’d just shucked it.
“Not exactly. I dunno if it would bother me so much if I thought he really felt for her.”
“No sign of it?”
“Not to my eyes. Christine maybe has Cora a little bamboozled. I can’t tell ’cause there’s been so much commotion about…all this.” Marvin gestured with his arm to indicate the spectrum of a wedding reception.
“Room looks good,” Bob said.
“Yeah. That’s Cora and Jolene’s doing. Nice of Jo to help her so much.”
Bob chuckled and took a drink of his beer. “Somethin’ to be said for having a son. Guess you got yourself one now, too, though.” He mock-punched Marvin’s upper arm. Marvin, however, didn’t smile at the joke.
“It’s not just the draft, though I can see where that’d be more than enough for you. What really bothers me is that he’s…unformed, not that he knows it. Maybe he could be a man. I don’t know. I don’t know what his intentions are, not that good intentions prevent bad results. You know…?” Marvin trailed off in embarrassment. “Nothin’ good gonna come out of this one, I’m afraid,” he said.
THAT NIGHT, ALEX AND Christine stayed in the bridal suite of the Lewellen Hotel in Richmont, a wedding gift from Bob and Jolene. It wasn’t a suite, really, just a big room on the fifth floor. The bathroom had an oversize tub though, and a walkin closet and a coffeemaker. Although neither of them drank coffee, it made Christine feel grown-up to be in a room where someone thought she did. She was dying for someone to call her Mrs. O’Gara. A bud of hope that Alex would carry her over the threshold hadn’t bloomed, but then she thought maybe he was saving it for tomorrow when they moved into their own apartment.
Alex switched on the television set and flopped on the double bed. “Cool,” he said. “Dodgers and Reds, bottom of the fifth…thought I was gonna miss the whole thing.”
“Honey,” Christine said, trying out the married-sounding endearment, “we’re not watching TV tonight, are we? I mean, it’s our…”
“Nag, nag, nag,” Alex said, but she could see he was teasing. “Is this what it’s going to be like, now that you got the ball and chain locked on?”
“Well, I just thought we could have supper downstairs while we’re still all dressed up, and then…” Christine tried flirtatious wheedling, obviously coy, but it worked on Alex.
“I’m still stuffed,” he interrupted. “Let me just see the end of this. We’ll get that nice supper you want and then…I’ll show you what’s the point of being married.”
Christine sighed and sank into an upholstered chair, smoothing the skirt of her pink going-away outfit beneath her. A corsage of pink roses and baby’s breath was pinned above her heart and she left it there, patiently folding her hands to wait for her husband. Maybe he’d be hungry when the game was over and her late-supper-in-the-dining-room idea would be lovely. She had an idea of what men were like, and considered it her place to learn to give in, even though it infuriated her when her mother gave her father his way.
While she was washing her hair that morning, the thought had come to her—what if they’re right? Her parents had made no secret of their disapproval, staining Christine’s daydreams like grape juice on a tablecloth. She’d drawn determination out of the necessity that she not weaken under their pressure. But this morning Cora had smiled and given her a hug when she’d come down for breakfast and chirped her pleasure that it was a pretty day after all.
What have I done? Christine had asked silently, letting the shower pound on her upturned face. Then, she’d reassured herself—if it doesn’t work out, I can get a divorce. But that thought clanged an alarm in her mind. If I’m thinking about a divorce on my wedding day…No. This is what I want. This is just nerves. He is much better than they see. I’m not wrong about him.
She’d rinsed her hair with deliberate attention and busied herself with setting it on rollers, and doing her nails in a pale-pink frost while the dryer hose anchored her in one place, rushing an ocean in her ears, an ocean to drown words that might have held hands and pulled one another to shore.
When she stood in the back of the church and saw that Alex and the minister were in place, she wanted to feel something other than floaty and disembodied. This is the happiest day of my life, she told herself, and then the notion that the happiest day of her life was already half gone made her feel sick. The piece of life women dream over like the slice of wedding cake young girls put under their pillows: it was almost over for her. Christine watched Rebecca’s slender hips sway like a metronome as she got farther away and away down the aisle, and she felt something like envy. When her father didn’t step up to the line to begin their slow march to Christine’s new life, she knew the fight wasn’t over after all, and the pressure she applied to his arm brought her back around to her insistent joy. But then again, when the minister asked, “Who gives this woman to be married to this man,” she had a last thought that her father might put an end to it. She turned her head, cumbersome beneath the gauzy veil, to say, “All right, you win, stop the wedding now,” but her father did not look back at her.
“Her mother and I do,” he said, and his voice sounded broken and too loud. She decided again that she was happy.
“This was the happiest day of my life,” she wrote that night after Alex was asleep. “I didn’t even think about the baby today. It was just for Alex and me, perfect and romantic. At dinner in the dining room, he thanked me for believing in him.”
THEY HAD A TINY efficiency apartment in Darrville, a second floor walk-up above a storefront law office, from w
hich Christine could walk to work at Thriftway. She’d only signed up for one class her first semester at the Richmont branch of Indiana University because she didn’t know how she’d get there if Alex wasn’t home. She could tell he wasn’t all that keen on sitting home himself while she took his car to school and she certainly didn’t want to ask her parents. Alex had promised to get a job and was out all day every day looking, but hadn’t found anything he wanted to do yet. “Do you think I want to bag groceries?” she’d challenged him once. “Do you think I like it?”
Alex had acted chastened, put his head down and said, “No. Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Okay, get me an application. From the store. I was just trying to do like guys are supposed to, y’know? Make something of myself for you. Do better.” His shoulders went up and down in a resigned shrug.
Christine had jumped in. “Oh, honey, I know. It’s okay. We’re getting by. I do want you to have a chance to make it.” And when she said it, it was what she really felt, even though the next day when she came home and found Alex watching Truth or Consequences on television, she’d been angry again. Yellowed venetian blinds sliced daylight through their apartment like an onion, but she couldn’t pay for curtains as well as rent, groceries and gas out of her check even with her tencent-an-hour merit raise. Sometimes she even thought she smelled the onion, and her eyes stung. If the blinds could have been raised, it might have helped, but they were broken—like the deadbolt lock and the handle off the medicine cabinet. An orange-and-brown flowered couch from the Goodwill store looked terrible on the braided rag rug, too, not cozy as she’d hoped, and sterling silver chafing dishes and candlesticks were plain silly set on the too-small slab of counter alongside the chipped porcelain sink.
“What’s for dinner?” Alex asked nightly, and before the end of September she was sick of answering tuna casserole or baloney sandwiches. Every now and then, Cora would slip Christine a twenty; she tried to put a little aside for extras like candles or a picture for the wall, but it usually went to replenishing supplies like sugar and toilet paper and noodles.
He says he wants me to be proud of him, and I don’t want to take away his pride, but sometimes I just wish he’d get any old job. What’s going to happen when I have to stop working? I can’t say anything, because he already says I nag him, but the only reason I can still wear my black pants is that I don’t button them underneath my apron at work. I’m so tired all the time, I know it’s a drag for him. I don’t have anything in common with my friends anymore, or even with Alex, since he’s not the one throwing up or dragging himself off the couch to go bag stupid groceries. Their lives are mostly the same as when we were in high school—their mothers even still do their laundry and cook dinner for them—except I’m the one who does it for Alex. But I know I’m doing the right thing and I love Alex so much. All this is so hard on him, too.
Christine hid the notebook under her sweaters, tucked in cardboard boxes in the back of the closet that had no pole to hang anything on.
twelve
“LOOK, BOY, THAT’S the way it is, signed and sealed by the Commander In Chief in this here Executive Order. It’s the amended Military Selective Service act of 1971. Look it up yourself. Been no paternity deferments for months, see, so it don’t matter if you do have kids. Your draft board already done tol’you, you is goin’.”
Alex sat on the other side of a uniformed man’s desk in a closet-sized room with puke-green paint peeling from the ceiling and upper walls. Sgt. H. Jackson, his breastplate said. The dark-skinned Negro cackled like a hardwood fire at Alex’s rage. He leaned back in his swivel chair and slowly lit a cigarette and exhaled languidly.
Alex’s induction notice lay face-up on the desk between them, a crinkled piece of paper swathed in dirty window light.
“Man, you can’t do this. I got the birth certificates right here. You can’t do this.” Alex was shouting at this man lording it over him.
“What choo complainin’ ’bout? You got thirty days.” Then, narrowing his eyes and leaning forward, Sergeant Jackson, who’d had nothing to do with the induction notice, who, indeed, had been posted in Maryland until the day before yesterday, decided to take the credit. He exaggerated his speech into caricature Southern black again, the way he liked to tweak the redneck white boys. “Jes’ watch me do it. You think you ain’t gonna take no orders from no black muther, huh, boy? Think again, because you is, boy, you is. I picked you out the pile myself.”
Trapped. Like a damn animal, Alex thought. The rusty muffler that hung too low beneath his car banged on the street when his right front tire careened in and out of an unfilled pothole. The sound and thump were a sudden jar, and then he heard the airy roar that told him a hole had opened in the pipe. “Goddamn,” he shouted, hunkered over the steering wheel and then he was crying and bearing down on the accelerator in rage. He rocked back and forth on the hinge of his elbows, as if trying to shake some sense into the steering wheel. He felt as he had on his wedding day when he saw Christine approach on her father’s arm, a beautiful specter displacing the air he was trying to breathe.
He’d been paralyzed for months and months, terrified at the notion of little men in black pajamas shooting at him while fire rained from the sky. He’d been the worst hunter in his family, the butt of his uncle’s jokes about his terrible aim and squeamishness. Never once had he bagged his own deer, and the time he’d shot a squirrel, he’d thrown up in the bushes when his father made him skin it. “Considering jungle law,” they’d laughed, “it’s a damn good thing for Alex here the squirrels ain’t got themselves no guns, or he’d be one dead boy.” The first year he had his own permit, the year before his father died, his uncle and his father drew straws to see which one of them would get to use it. They carried pints of Wild Turkey inside their hunting vests, and pulled them out for long, deep swigs. Alex had reddened when the game warden congratulated him by saying, “Now you’re a man.”
It was bizarre: mocked and punished by his father for his failures as an O’Gara, Christine’s father hated him most for being an O’Gara. Alex got that much.
The whole business with Chris had seemed his salvation at first. She made him feel something good. More than the sex, too. Something was soft. Once they were married and the baby came he’d be exempt. It should have worked. The baby part terrified him, but Chris said he didn’t have to be anything like his own father, that she’d teach him. The whole thing should have worked. Even though from the beginning there were glitches, the exemption was worth whatever he had to put up with. Chris had bitched at him for months until he’d got a job, but he had, after all, hadn’t he? He’d hoped he could find something that would show her father he’d been wrong. Being a stock boy at the hardware store wasn’t his idea of a good time, but it was better than the army.
He’d nearly fainted when Chris’s water broke, and she began pacing and gasping the length of the living room. It was almost a month too early, and when he tried to call Cora she wasn’t home. He’d not wanted to be in the labor room, but a nurse pushed him and said, “Hold her hand, be sweet to her.” Chris was covered in a clammy sweat. Then, suddenly, there was a frantic jostle of activity and she was wheeled into the delivery room. He stood outside until he heard her wailing, and then he had to leave. It was like he had been accidentally cast in the wrong part in the wrong play; he had no idea what his lines were supposed to be or how to act them, overcome with a surreal sense of impossibility. His life was always someplace he couldn’t catch up to.
That same aura of unreality he’d known on the hunts, at his wedding and for weeks after the unpredicted birth of twins, overcame him again as he careened his car away from the draft board office toward the apartment where Chris was surrounded by diapers and bibs and spit-up cloths while at least one of the girls was always crying. Cora, of course, practically lived there, and her disdain for him was palpable. She shooed him aside when he was near one of the babies. He was afraid of himself. His hands were to
o big. Certainly they were too clumsy, too jumpy, too O’Gara.
In late winter’s dirty midafternoon glare now, he pulled his car to the curb in front of the apartment. He was supposed to be at work, but he was too shaky to go. Maybe he shouldn’t even tell Chris. Maybe he should just take off for Canada. No, he’d have to get some of his stuff. Maybe Chris could get some money from her parents and she and the babies go with him. They were a family, even if Cora didn’t see that. Fear rose like flood water and he sloshed and waded against the current. Soon it would rise to his chest and then cover his mouth and nose while his eyes watched him drown.
Alex turned the ignition off and sat in the car while the chill outside dissipated the small heat that had circulated. His feet were leaden and his hands immobile. He couldn’t leave with nothing, but he couldn’t stay; he couldn’t tell Chris, but he needed her help. Perfectly split like an apple through his core, he sat and trembled.
A sharp rap on the driver’s-side window startled him conscious. The early darkness had almost fully overtaken daylight though part of the horizon was vivid above a remaining slice of great red sun. Alex jumped, his heart pounding too fast, unevenly, against the wall of his chest as though answering the knock on the glass. Chris’s face gathered shape and gradations of light in front of him when he turned.
“What the hell are you doing?” she shouted, trying to open the car door. It was locked. Her face looked too white. Long strands of brown hair had pulled loose from the rubber band in back. Maybe she hadn’t even combed it today. Maybe she hadn’t washed it in three or four days. She wore no coat. The top of her jeans still wouldn’t button.
Alex shook his head no.
“What do you mean, no? Open the door. Come in. What’s wrong? I left the babies alone, I’ve got to get back to them. You got the formula, didn’t you? Come in, I need help. What’s the matter?” She rattled off questions he didn’t answer. She must have seen him from the window.