Places to Stay the Night

by Ann Hood

  “How fast does this go?” she whispered.

  Again he was confused. How fast does what go? he thought. Already he could feel himself hard inside his pants.

  “This,” she said, again as if she had read his mind. She patted the top of the stick shift.

  “Fast,” he whispered back. Steppenwolf was on the radio. “Magic Carpet Ride.” “Real fast,” he said.

  “Let’s do it,” she said. She opened her eyes and looked right into his.

  He was still leaning across her, his face only inches from hers.

  “You got it,” he said. _

  He tried to adjust his still hard penis so he could drive. Out of the corner of his eye, Tom was sure she had seen him do it, and that she’d smiled. He was so sure he’d been right all along. She wasn’t an ice princess at all. She was wild. He shifted into first, and made her climb. At eighty he glanced away for a second, and saw Libby leaning out the window, screaming “Faster!”

  He pressed down harder on the accelerator. They were over a hundred now, and still she wanted more. He could hardly see out the windshield, the tires were kicking up so much dust. And later, when they’d gone as fast as they could, and he’d pulled back off the road, and Libby was flushed and panting from the ride, he’d started at that long white neck, and slid his tongue up it, across her chin, to her mouth, taking her sweat and a layer of dust with him. That was how he thought of her still, tasting like dust on his tongue.

  Holly, Massachusetts, was famous once a year, at Christmas time. Along with other towns across the country, like Santa Claus, Maine, and Mistletoe, Iowa, and Christmas Tree, Washington, people sent their Christmas cards there to be postmarked. Holly even used a special postmark in December. It had a sprig of holly in the stamp, right between the HOLLY and the MA.

  To Tom, that made Holly even more special. It made the town seem almost magical. So did the way the moon fell across the high stalks of corn that bordered the outskirts of town, and the way each spring everyone chipped in to clean and repair the buildings in the town square. Once, a film crew had shown up to investigate the possibility of using Holly in a movie. It was that perfect a place. And even though they decided to film their movie somewhere in Canada instead, their consideration only reaffirmed Tom’s certainty that it was the best place to grow up, and to grow old.

  That was one of the reasons he couldn’t believe that Libby had left. Why would she want to be in a city like Los Angeles, with traffic and smog and dangerous gangs? He should have listened to her more, taken her on vacations to other places so she could appreciate Holly the way he did. When they were first married, she used to drive to a travel agency in Albany and bring back brochures of Greece and Italy, Hawaii and Bermuda.

  “Look at this,” she’d say, pointing to one of the brochures. “Pink sand.” Tom would study the pictures of happy couples pedaling mopeds past bright purple flowers, or sunbathing on pink sand beaches, or eating grilled fish in a fancy restaurant. It would all seem distant and frivolous somehow. And as she read to him about optional excursions on glass-bottom boats and snorkeling lessons at coral reefs, he would get a knot in his stomach. Why couldn’t she be satisfied with what they had, with what was right here? For Tom, their small square house, with the babies crawling around and the two of them sitting on the couch with their feet in each other’s laps, was all he wanted.

  Sometimes, after she’d laid out all the travel brochures in front of him on the coffee table and read each one’s highlights, he’d say, “I’ve got a better idea. Let’s stay right here and make more babies.” He used to say he wanted nine, his own baseball team. Then Libby’s mouth would form into a straight, tight line as she carefully folded each brochure, smoothing the creases, running her fingers almost lovingly across the photographs of volcanoes and high-rise hotels. There was a drawer full of those brochures still, and after she left him, Tom sometimes pulled them out late at night and studied them, wondering what pleasure these places could have brought Libby and if their power could have somehow kept her here, where she belonged.

  For as long as she could remember, Libby Holliday had been trying to leave her family. She liked to think that the first time, when she was just eighteen years old, fresh out of high school and thinking she could become a movie star, she took Dana with her. Sort of. Libby was seven weeks pregnant and Dana was the size of a tadpole, floating inside her, forcing her to throw up every morning, ruining her plans.

  It was true that when she left Holly and Tom that first time, Libby was headed for New York City and, maybe, an abortion. But as time passed she could almost convince herself that she would have backed out, that she would not have gone through with it. Instead, Libby liked to think she would have had Dana and together they would have conquered the world. All the time she read about movie stars with children they’d had before they’d made it. She saw them on Entertainment Tonight, Suzanne Somers and Raquel Welch, too many to name, really. And there they were, famous, their children grown, everything having worked out neatly.

  Of course, Libby didn’t make it to New York at all, so in a way it was easy to rewrite the scene. It was much harder to accept the fact that what she did was let Tom find her and marry her and to settle down into the most ordinary, the dullest possible life. For so long Libby had thought she was special, but in the end she was no different from Sue or Dee-Dee or any other girl from school.

  In those early years, she thought about leaving all the time. She would get in her car and drive to the Vermont border, then just sit there, unable to cross it. Once she got as far as Winsted, Connecticut, only to turn back at the sound of a baby crying in a McDonald’s when she stopped for lunch. That little baby cried hard, her face turning purple, her eyes squeezed shut. Libby didn’t even finish her Big Mac, she just got in the car and drove home.

  Having Dana and Troy eleven months apart made leaving twice as hard. She kept her figure, even after two babies. At night, while everyone was asleep, she studied Tom’s maps, tracing the routes west. Libby started to make lists of what she’d take and what she’d leave behind. She read about movie stars, how old they were when they got started. She kept thinking she still had time.

  On her twenty-fifth birthday, she decided it was now or never. Libby went over to Sue’s and told her she was leaving. “I’ll come with you,” Sue said. “Maybe I could get a job out there too. Doing hair and makeup. Something like that.” They decided to leave bright and early the next morning. Libby crept out before anyone woke up. She didn’t pause to study her children’s faces, the way a woman in a movie night. She just left. Sue was waiting on the porch with Caitlin. She’d dressed Caitlin as if she was going to a party, in a bright yellow dress with ruffles and bows, little white ankle socks and shiny patent leather shoes.

  “Where are we dropping her?” Libby asked as they pulled out. “Your mother’s?”

  She would never forget that day, the air crackling with possibility, the sky just starting to turn from dark to light, a half moon still shining in front of them.

  “Drop her?” Sue said. “She’s coming along. I couldn’t leave her, Libby. I’d never forgive myself.”

  Libby had swallowed hard, focused on the road ahead of her. “Of course,” she said, seeing the logic of that. After all, Sue’s husband, Mitch, was dead. “You don’t have anyone to take care of her like I do.” She’d nodded, talking herself into the idea. “Why, I have Harp. He loves those kids. He’ll make sure they’re okay.” She even laughed. “He’s better with them than I am anyway.”

  “Sure, he is,” Sue told her. “If I had Harp …”

  She didn’t finish because she couldn’t. It simply wasn’t true. Sue would never leave her daughter behind. Never. And that lay between them all morning, as they drove farther and farther from Holly. Until finally Libby said, “Let’s go back.”

  Sue nodded, relieved. “All right,” she said.

  They never talked about going away again.

  The entire way cross-country Libby tri
ed not to think about Dana’s face receding in her rearview mirror as she drove away. To think about that would be to think about consequences, and Libby knew that train of thought would lead her straight back to Holly. She had tried to leave before, and it was the image of her children that brought her home again.

  This time she was determined to go and stay gone. She concentrated on not thinking. Because she hadn’t taken the proper time to plan everything out carefully, she only had two tapes with her, and one was Dana’s, The Violent Femmes. It gave Libby a headache. The other was Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits, and how long was a person supposed to listen to that? So she drove, singing along with the radio when she could and singing alone, loud, when she could only get religious stations.

  If she’d had the time, she would have mapped out a route that was interesting. She would have really seen America. But the way things had worked out, Libby felt as if someone was right on her tail, chasing her. That if she were to slow down, to stop and look at anything at all, she would go back. It was as if something bigger than herself was right there, breathing down her neck.

  So she moved forward, singing loud, pushing out that image of Dana growing smaller and smaller. She slept in Motel 6s, careful to fill out the comment cards, checking off Good or Fair in the boxes beside CLEANLINESS and COURTESY. She ate at Big Boy restaurants, three meals a day so she didn’t get run-down, even though she wasn’t very hungry. She made sure to eat a balanced meal, to avoid fried foods and too much caffeine. She took the time to figure out a fifteen percent tip after each meal and to fill in those comment cards too. “Add more chicken dishes,” she suggested. “And more fresh fish.”

  Still, at night in the strange motel beds, when she closed her eyes, her family’s faces came crashing into her head, and Libby had to press hard on her eyelids to block out what she had left behind.

  Mandy Harper Sullivan, like her brother Tom, was a jock. Field hockey, basketball, and powder puff football. She taught gym at the high school now, and her husband, Frank, owned a Bess Eaton Donuts franchise. She was built real solid, all muscle and tanned strong legs. She was like Tom in that everybody liked her. In school, they were the golden pair. A sister and brother who had everything. And somehow, like her brother, Mandy still believed it too.

  That first Saturday after Libby left him, Tom showed up at the garage early like always. Except this time when Mandy looked at him she said, “You look like shit.”

  Unshaven, bleary-eyed, he looked older, like he had aged years in just a few days.

  “I feel even worse,” he told her.

  She poured him a cup of coffee and he added whiskey to it.

  “She is not worth doing this to yourself,” Mandy said.

  “Yes, she is,” Tom told her. “She’s worth everything.”

  Since Libby had left, it was as if Tom was seeing everything through new eyes. Even Mandy. She suddenly seemed simple-minded, all happy with her stupid life. She stood before him frowning, dressed in baggy gray shorts and a UMass sweatshirt, a whistle dangling from a red and white cord around her neck. She would leave here to coach the girl’s field hockey team. Both of her daughters, Lindsay and Ali, were its star players. Didn’t they know anything? Tom thought, watching her arrange the dozens of doughnuts, all glazed and sugary, on a tray.

  “First of all,” Mandy was saying, “she’ll be back. You know it. The woman cannot take care of herself.”

  Tom laughed. That was another thing Mandy was wrong about. Libby could most certainly take care of herself. Better than anybody. Who did Mandy think she’d been taking care of all these years? Him? The kids? That was a joke. Libby looked after Libby. Period.

  “You don’t know the first thing about it,” he said. He took a chocolate honey-dipped doughnut and finished it off in two bites.

  “I know this,” Mandy said. “Cathy Communale is divorced. Dee-Dee Winthrop is divorced. These girls used to drool after you. They would not have left you. Not in a million years.”

  “Cathy Communale,” Tom said.

  Way back, in junior high, she had been some kind of roller-skating star. She competed, statewide, nationally. Her mother sewed her these costumes, little flared velvet skirts and tight bodysuits. Her thighs were thick and muscled. And once, behind the school, where the kids who couldn’t drive yet used to go to make out, she’d parted those thighs and let him slip his fingers between them, inside the bodysuit, right into her. He still remembered how she used to look out there on the rink, how warm and wet she had felt.

  “Cathy was one of my best friends,” Mandy said. “And you threw her over for Libby.”

  Did everyone here live in the past like this? Tom thought. They were kids then. Cathy Communale had parted her thick thighs for him twenty years ago. More, even.

  People started arriving, all awkward at first. Here sat Tom Harper, whose wife had left him. No one really knew what to say. So they talked cars. That was always safe. And Mandy poured them coffee and let them slap her ass. Tom felt as if he was watching someone else’s life go by.

  Then Pat O’Malley said, “My kid’s trying out for the football team in the fall.”

  “He’s already that old?” somebody said.

  Pat nodded. He used to play too. Tom saw streaks of silver throughout his hair and in the chest hairs that poked out of the top of his shirt.

  “You know what I was telling him just this morning?” Pat said. “About that game where you threw seventy yards for a touchdown, Harp. I’ll never forget how beautiful that was.”

  “What a day,” Jake Fontainbleu piped in. “The leaves were all gold, and we could smell fall. You know the way fall smells?”

  “Right, right,” Pat said, nodding, looking at Tom still, with great admiration. “And you threw that ball perfectly. Just right. It was like time stopped, and all there was at that moment was you and that ball falling in a perfect arc, and that crisp blue sky, and the smell of fall.” Pat shook his head. “Seventy yards.”

  “And no one’s broken the record yet,” Mandy said.

  They were all looking at him, shaking their heads, wide-eyed and awed, still, after all this time.

  Troy was not friends with any of the jocks, not O’Malley or Kevin or Mike or any of them. His crowd was the guys who went to school early and sat in their cars getting high before classes. The guys who sat in the last row in class’ and never had their homework done. The ones who were always getting kicked out of assembly, out of class, out of school. The girls in the crowd teased their hair and sprayed it stiff, wore leather jackets, too much makeup, high heels even with jeans.

  Since he’d been with Nadine, Troy hadn’t seen them much. But the week after his mother left, he drove down to the Dairy Queen, where they hung out on Saturday nights, sitting on the hoods of their cars, drinking and smoking and planning the rest of their night.

  “To what do we owe this pleasure?” Gary Cooper said. Like Libby, his mother had great hopes for him, naming him after an old movie star, thinking he’d be something special.

  “Boredom,” Troy said. He hopped onto the hood of Gary’s car and pulled out a small plastic bag of pills he’d taken from Nadine’s top drawer. Right now, she was at work filling Dixie Cup dispensers with Dixie Cups decorated with autumn leaves. What a joke.

  A girl he didn’t know let out a low whistle. She had pockmarks on her face which she had tried to cover up with thick makeup, but even in this bad lighting Troy could see them.

  “A buffet,” he said, and spilled the pills onto the car.

  Everybody took some, and swallowed them with beer. The girl said, “Who are you anyway?”

  Gary threw his arm around Troy’s neck. “This here’s my old pal Troy Donahue. We’re teen idols, you know.”

  “I’m Marie,” she said, ignoring Gary, pushing closer to Troy.

  “Hey,” Gary said. “He’s taken. He’s got a girlfriend who would whip your ass in a second. She is bad.”

  “Do you?” Marie said.

 
Troy shrugged.

  “Although,” Gary was saying, “Troy is pretty bad himself.”

  “A lost cause,” Troy said.

  Gary’s girlfriend, Rena, came toward them, carrying a cardboard box with hamburgers and french fries in it. She looked at them and said, “What are you guys on?”

  Troy leaned toward Marie. “You want to be really bad?” he said. His voice seemed slowed down, like a record on the wrong speed.

  She was chewing peppermint gum. Troy got a good whiff of it when she answered, “You bet.”

  The four of them got into Gary’s car and took off.

  “This car sucks,” Troy said. “We should have these ladies in something really nice.” His eyes met Gary’s in the rearview mirror.

  “Like a BMW?” Gary said.

  “That would be good.”

  On the way, Marie kept nodding out, her head bobbing up and down, jerking herself awake, then mumbling before she went out again.

  Rena turned around. “Uppers,” she said, and poured a handful of pills into Troy’s hand. He opened another beer, and shook Marie half awake.

  “Take these,” he said. “You can’t be bad if you’re asleep.”

  He had to help her take them, and to sip the beer. By the time they got to Williams College, she was tapping her feet and talking so fast he could hardly understand her. They walked around the parking lot, “Car shopping,” Gary kept saying, until they found a BMW. A red one. Then Marie took off her shoes and with the spiked heel of one broke the passenger window. She climbed in, over all that glass, talking and talking, unlocking the doors, falling into the back seat. Troy followed her, laughing. There was blood all over her hands.

  “I’ve only had sex with three guys, you know. And I loved two of them,” she said. “I was always really good at spelling. Give me a word. Really. Give me a word.”

  “Mississippi,” Troy said.

  Gary was driving fast, away from the college, toward the quarry.

  “That’s easy. Give me a hard one. Come on, come on, come on.”