Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

by Brad Watson

  When I picked her up at the church on Sundays, morning service over and all the Baptist folk standing out on the lawn feeling good about the world and their lives, it was dismaying to see the vague pall of anxiety that seemed to settle over them when they saw me pull up in the old VW bus, and on some of the faces you could see it was a type of anger or disgust. And Olivia, in her yellow or powder-blue Sunday dress and white shoes, throwing her hand up in a wave, saying good-bye to her family over a shoulder, running on her toes out to meet me and climb up into the bus, me and my jeans and T-shirt and long hair—you’d think they were standing in the yards of their beloved homes watching some heartless foreclosure agent auction them away. It was always a rotten feeling, just barely made bearable by the vision of Olivia, how pretty and fresh she always looked, and I was always glad to round the corner, away from all those disapproving Christian eyes. The only thing I’d ever liked about church was the stained-glass windows in the sanctuary, with the human-looking animals and the people in colorful robes, and their pale, luminescent faces, yearning.

  She was a good Baptist girl, but she wasn’t a prude, and she liked to drink a beer here and there, and go to parties, and she generally liked my rowdy crowd. She was a virgin, though, and determined to stay one until she married. After a few months, I’d just about given up on that, and then one night on the way home she told me to pull over somewhere, anywhere, and I did, and everything changed. I’m not sure what had changed for her. She was a nice girl, but nice girls liked fooling around, too, once they were able to arrange the justification for it in their minds.

  AND THEN IT WAS like we’d turned on the power and couldn’t find the switch to turn it back off. We started doing it everywhere. Out in the VW bus in the parking lot during study hall. On the visitors’ side of the stadium, beneath the bleachers, during lunch period. Sometimes, at night, we’d just pull the bus over to the side of the road, traffic swerving past, people hooting and honking. We did have a favorite private spot, for a while, a little cubbyhole of a niche in the brush along a sparsely populated street on the north end of town. You could pull in there and it was like the brush closed up behind you, it was that inconspicuous. We’d pull in there and take our time, like real lovers, then collapse to either side of one another, giving our bodies time to stop humming.

  We didn’t realize that people living in a new subdivision one block over had noticed our lights pulling in there night after night, shutting off, clicking on again, pulling out. Maybe they thought we were burglars working a plan. Maybe they just didn’t like the idea of young, careless couples fornicating, rocking the vehicle, practically in their new backyards. At any rate, one night as I leaned on an elbow admiring her pale, slim, spraddled legs, a flashlight shone its beam directly into my naked lap. A man’s voice said, “Looks like we missed the action,” and another one said, “Get dressed and step out of the love machine, son.” I could make out the uniform and the badge, the heavy gun belt, the gun, even in the darkness.

  Olivia scrambled for her panties and bra. I groped for my own underwear and pants, pulled them on, opened the side door of the bus, and stepped barefoot onto the cool ground. I closed the door behind me, for Olivia’s sake.

  The two cops shone their flashlights on me, keeping their distance.

  “What are you doing here?” one said.

  “Well,” I said, gestured, shrugged. I hiccuped out a nervous laugh.

  “He thinks it’s funny,” the one cop said.

  “I do, too,” the other cop said. He was older than the first cop, and a little shorter and stouter. That’s about all I could tell, in the dark with only their flashlights in our faces for light.

  “The people who live in those houses right over there don’t think it’s funny,” the younger cop said. “They thought maybe you were parking here to case their houses.”

  “Rob them,” the older cop said. “Break in, steal things, or worse.”

  “Much worse.”

  “I didn’t know they could see us,” I said.

  They said nothing. The first cop leaned his head toward the bus window to look in at Olivia, trying to cover herself, cowering on the floor in there.

  “All right, miss, get out and get your clothes on.”

  They stepped back to let her out and kept their flashlights on her as she got dressed. They were quiet, as if they were studying her. This made me angry and I almost said something. She was crying. I moved closer and stood beside her. Something about looking at her in the small harsh glare of the cops’ flashlights made her seem all the more vulnerably beautiful to me. When she was dressed the cops switched off their flashlights. Every now and then they’d switch them back on and shine them into our eyes as we spoke. They asked us who our parents were. Where we lived. How old we were. But they didn’t really seem to care about any of that, hardly waiting for our answers, seeming bored. In the end they let us go with a warning not to park there again and a few halfhearted words about hauling us in if they ever caught us doing this again, and told us to go home.

  “You know what’s going to happen, you keep doing this,” the younger cop said. “You know how it is that people make babies? With the old in and out?”

  “A-makin’ whoopee,” the older cop said, and laughed.

  “Seriously,” the younger cop said. “We’re gonna keep an eye on you.”

  “’Bye, now,” said the older cop, giving us an odd little wave. Then they got into their squad car, backed out onto the road, and drove away. Strange cops.

  WHEN WE GOT BACK to town after eloping, the apartment all ready for us to live there officially, we went to tell our parents what we’d done.

  We went to Olivia’s house first.

  “Oh,” her mother said, deflating into the sofa cushions, a hand over her mouth. “Oh, oh, oh.”

  “WHAT?” her father said. He was a tall, good-natured man with a heart condition, who spoke very loudly and was a little bit deaf. He’d been an artilleryman, when he was young, in the war.

  “THEY’RE MARRIED, IKE,” Olivia’s mother said loudly back to him.

  It took a moment to register. He stood there vacantly, looking at her, then cast an embarrassed glance at us before jamming his hands into his trouser pockets.

  “Well,” he said softly, “no use crying over spilt milk.”

  THEN WE WENT TO my parents’ house. My mother was at the kitchen table, in a very good mood, nibbling peanut brittle. My father was in the back bedroom, reading a magazine. The kitchen opened up to the den, and Olivia sat in there on the couch, her knees pressed together in terror.

  I sat down opposite my mother at the table, under the bright bulb of the hanging lamp. I didn’t want to go through with it. But it was too late for that.

  “I have to tell you something,” I said.

  Her nibbling slowed. She could tell something was wrong.

  “Olivia and I got married,” I said. I said it quietly. So quietly that Olivia and my younger brother, Mike, sitting on the sofa on the other side of the den, couldn’t hear it. Of course, Olivia knew what I was saying. She sat there and stared into something only she could see. I said to my mother, “We went over to Livingston and did it this afternoon.”

  She said nothing for a moment, unable to swallow the brittle in her mouth. When she finally could, she whispered, “Is she pregnant?”

  It was awful to look at her eyes just then. A sudden grief had filled them, laced with a terrible dread, a horror, really, as if I’d just told her that one of us, one of her children, had died.

  I nodded.

  She got up from the table and walked to the back of the house. I looked over at Olivia. She had closed her eyes and grabbed on to my little brother’s hand. He looked confused but not displeased to have Olivia holding his hand.

  In a minute, as I was pacing in the living room, my father came in and asked me if what my mother had just told him was true. I nodded.

  He didn’t say anything, looking as if he couldn’t comprehend it.


  “What are you going to do?” he said.

  “We have a place, an apartment over by East Mississippi,” I said. It’s what everyone called the asylum. “We’re going on over there, I guess.”

  “How far along is she?”

  “About five months, we think.”

  “Damn,” he said. He shook his head, jingled the coins in his pocket. “Well, go on over there, then,” he said. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. I have to go see about your mother. I think this is about to kill her.”

  Olivia and I drove to our little apartment, mounted the rickety steps to the deck, and went inside. I turned on the big, chuffing fan, to pull out the stifling air. We sat down on the sofa, nothing but the engulfing huff of the fan for sound, the hot breeze searing our skin, beneath the bare bulb of the overhead light.

  THE BARE BULB LIGHT was so harsh, I lit candles instead and set them on the coffee table. Olivia had brought over her old cat, Max, and he rubbed against my leg, hungry. I fed him, and checked the seedcake in the cage of her parakeet, Donald, who whistled and made as if to bite my finger. She’d left her pet rabbit, an old Easter gift, with her parents, because she’d never liked it, with its weird red eyes and bland personality. I think she felt guilty about it, though. I’d told her to leave them all, afraid the heat in the place would kill them during the day, but she couldn’t.

  She’d been sitting on the sofa, that slightly stunned and day-dreamy look on her face I loved so much, and I’d taken heart. But then she seemed to come to, got up from the sofa, and began pacing up and down the little hallway from the living room to the bedroom and back. She took off her Keds and walked barefoot on her longish narrow feet, with the pretty toes I liked to roll between my fingers and call them her peanuts. She was crying quietly. At first I couldn’t tell. The place was so hot, before the fan had a chance to help out a bit, that we’d started sweating the moment we walked in, my T-shirt and Olivia’s peasant smock blotched with dampness, and our faces shone with perspiration. When I saw she was crying, I held her for a minute, but it was still too hot for that. I got her to sit at the kitchen table in front of the dormer window there for the breeze. I brought one of the candles in from the living room and set it beside the fridge, on the counter away from the window so it wouldn’t blow out.

  There wasn’t much to eat, but there was a fat ripe tomato on the counter, and a new unopened jar of mayonnaise, and a loaf of white bread. I tore off a square of paper towel for a plate and made each of us a tomato sandwich, and got two beers from the fridge, all the while keeping an eye on Olivia to see if she was cheering up at all. We ate the sandwiches and sipped the beers, not talking. Olivia was still sniffling a little bit but she was coming around. When we’d eaten, I took her by the hand and led her to the living room, and put a record on our little record player, some easy stuff. Maybe it wasn’t the best choice. It was by that singer, Melanie, and when she sang “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma,” Olivia started sniffling again. I was holding on to her and shuffling us around in the old Teen Center slow dance, and she dug her chin into my collarbone and started to bawl.

  “This isn’t what I wanted,” she said between sobs. “I wanted to go to college. I wanted to date lots of boys. I wanted to graduate and marry somebody successful and live in a big two-story house and have lots of children but not like this, and not in a shitty old attic that’s hot as an oven, and not even graduate from high school. And poor.” She punctuated her sentences with little bops of her fist against my other shoulder.

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Are you?” she said, as if accusing.

  “I do love you, though,” I said.

  She drew in a big slow breath and let it out, still leaning against me.

  “Oh, God,” she said. Then, “God, please forgive me.”

  I said, “God doesn’t mind people having babies.”

  “This isn’t funny,” she said, crying again.

  “I mean it,” I said.

  “Just stop.”

  I shuffled us around for a minute, while she settled down.

  “Well, wait and see,” I said. “I’m going to work hard, and build us a beautiful house—it’ll be like a mansion, to us anyway—and we’ll have beautiful children, starting with this one, and they’ll be so beautiful that people will hardly even recognize them as ordinary human beings, like a whole new amazingly beautiful and intelligent subspecies or something. Coltranians. Like you. And we’ll have dogs, and horses. A couple of fat, arrogant cats. And I’ll drive a cool Ford pickup, a good, solid, settled-down man, and you’ll have something like a Mercedes station wagon to haul around all the kids in style. And we’ll have a boat, if you want, and take it to the reservoir, and ski, and maybe even build a cabin beside my grandmother’s little lake up in the country, looking out over the water.”

  Olivia gave a quietly derisive snort when I was done, but I could tell she was lightening up.

  I said, “We’ve got all the time in the world. Look how young we are. Look how much time we have to try to get all the things we want.” I stepped back so I could look at her.

  “It’s going to be all right,” I said.

  She nodded, looked at me for a moment, then looked down again.

  “Okay,” she said. The tears were there again, but quiet ones. They were tears of sadness, I thought, instead of fear. That was better, I hoped.

  ABOUT AN HOUR LATER my older brother showed up, with his fiancée.

  They came into the little living room, and I turned on the bare, bright bulb again, and after some sympathetic and concerned small talk from them, questions about how this came about and what our plans might be, they got down to business.

  Olivia and I knew that his fiancée, Ruth, had been whisked to New York the previous year by her parents for an abortion. We knew what was coming. As soon as they even hinted at the idea that we should consider doing the same, Olivia leapt up and stomped to the bathroom and slammed the door. Immediately, the house began to shudder from the force of the chugging fan in there trying to pull wind through the little space under the door, which made a weird kind of howling sound.

  Curtis and Ruth seemed astonished, looking from the hallway where Olivia’d disappeared, back to me, back to the hallway. Almost instantly after Olivia shut the bathroom door, cutting off the fan breeze, our sweating increased, beads popping out on our foreheads and running down our faces. It tickled me trickling from my armpits down over my ribs.

  I went into the tiny hallway and knocked on the bathroom door, having to shout to be heard over the noise of the fan and the wind howling through the little space below the door.

  “Olivia, would you just come out, please?”

  “Tell them to go away!”

  “Don’t worry, we’re not going to do that.”

  “I’m not listening!”

  I made my apologies to Curtis and Ruth and, after a moment, realizing that Olivia was not coming out of the bathroom until they left, and maybe worrying that the fan’s desperate huffing might destabilize the old frame house itself, they got up to go. When Ruth had stepped out onto the deck, Curtis came back to me.

  “Just think about it, okay?” he said.

  “Curtis, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “Were you here just now? Did I imagine that you and Ruth were just in there talking to me while Olivia shut herself in the bathroom and lost her mind?”

  He frowned, gave me a hug, and they left.

  “Are they gone?” Olivia shouted from the bathroom.

  “Yes!” I shouted back.

  She opened the door and stalked back to the bedroom and fell onto her side into the bed. The house stopped shaking and the hot air in the apartment began to move again. When I followed her into the bedroom she looked up at me, her face puffy and streaked with tears.

  “I’m not going to do that, I’m not,” she said.

  “It’s okay,” I said, “I know. We’re not.”

  “I couldn’t do that,
” she declared.

  “Me, neither,” I said. “And it’s way too late for that, anyway. They didn’t realize. Don’t worry.”

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Tell them to go away,” Olivia said, and burrowed herself beneath the bedsheet, clamping a pillow over her head.

  It was the landlady from downstairs, standing in the weak yellow glow of the deck light, her scrawny arms crossed, a scowl on her face.

  “If every night is going to be some kind of commotion like this,” she said, “I am not going to stand for it. You can take your kind of behavior to some other place.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I promise we’re not usually like that.”

  “Or loud other kind of behavior, either,” she said, narrowing her eyes and arching her thinning brows.

  I nodded, mumbled, “Okay, right.” Then she stomped down the deck stairs.

  “Was it them?” Olivia said, her voice muffled beneath the pillow.

  “Just Curtis,” I said. “Forgot his keys.”

  Olivia stayed beneath the pillow. I watched her side move up and down with breathing for a moment, until it began shaking with sobs, and I went into the darkened kitchen and sat there alone for a while, sweating in the warm breeze the fan pulled through the kitchen window. I smoked a cigarette. I’d been there a good hour, knowing Olivia had cried herself to sleep, when an old Chevy Bel Air station wagon idled up to the stop sign on the quiet street below. I couldn’t see who was in it but I recognized it from the student parking lot at school. I knew the boy who drove it. I heard loud stage-whispers, and made out some girl’s voice saying, Is that it? Is that where they’re living? And other loud whispers, unintelligible. And then the wagon rattled off down the street.

  This is about as strange as it gets, I said to myself.

  But for the sound of the fan huffing away, then, the apartment was quiet. It was quiet on the little streets in our new neighborhood, down below. The streetlamps stood silently above their diaphanous pools of yellow-gray light. The neighbors’ houses were quiet, sleeping. The inmates at the asylum down the street were quiet, sleeping or lying awake, wondering how this had happened to them, or who they were, or where. Our parents were home, in their beds or sitting at kitchen tables, drinking coffee, sleepless.