by Ann Hood
“We could go and get some Wild Turkey,” Nadine was saying, her mouth close to his ear.
Something sent a shiver up Troy’s spine and made him push her away. He kept his arms on her shoulders and looked at her face. She looked a million years old. Jenny, Troy thought, had skin that felt like ice, all smooth and cool.
Nadine tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. He could see the jagged orange line under her jaw where her makeup ended.
“What?” she said.
It sounded gruff and indistinct. Like “Wha?” He thought of the way Jenny and her parents spoke. Sometimes he went home and looked up the words they had used. Words like lackadaisical and procrastinate. Words that kids in the college track at school memorized for SAT tests.
“It’s that girl, right?” Nadine said. Her whole body seemed to collapse like a quarterback who’d just been sacked. One minute running fast and proud, full of purpose. The next minute, defeated.
Troy could not look Nadine in the eyes and say that it was not Jenny exactly. That instead it was that jagged line of makeup under her chin, and the late shift at the Dixie Cup factory, and the tattoo he knew rested between her shoulder blades, and the sound of that one word, “Wha?” So he just shook his head, as if he had no answers, and started the car, and slowly made his way down the slippery road.
Renate did not think that men and women could be friends. Sex was always there somehow. Yet Tom Harper was not letting on that there was even the slightest hint of an attraction between them. He appeared at her door on his way to work and shoveled the long driveway that led to the road. He always came with jumper cables when she called him from parking lots with a dead battery in Jack’s car. He even showed her how to use the cables, bending close to her, his breath coming out in little white puffs as he carefully explained how to hook them to the battery and when to call to the other car to start up.
Then one night he appeared at her door with a new battery for the car. A funny kind of gift that made her feel special. She stood behind him and watched as he replaced the old one. Renata had wanted to hug him when he was through, to press him close to her. But something in his eyes stopped her from doing anything more than smiling and telling him thanks.
Always, after he left her house at night, she’d sit sipping the beer he’d brought, and wonder how he could keep it so platonic. Renata knew she was not at all beautiful, certainly not in the way Libby was. But men had always been attracted to her. She knew she had a certain sensual appeal. Maybe he was just not very sexual. Maybe that was why Libby had left him. But then she’d think of his slow smile, or his hand on her back guiding her through crowds on the Sunday trips they sometimes took, and she’d think that surely he felt that current too. The slight charge that passed between them.
“Are you in love with him?” Millie asked one night as they stood at the door waving goodbye to Tom. Her voice sounded almost hopeful.
“Don’t be silly,” Renata told her.
But that question buzzed around her head all night. It kept her awake. She always gave him food when he left. Mexican casseroles, stews and cakes. Troy had told her that he was a terrible cook. That he served mashed potatoes with lasagna. That all of it came from boxes or cans.
Tonight she’d given him stuffed shells with an extra jar of her homemade tomato sauce. Renata found herself thinking that he needed taking care of. She kept seeing Millie’s face, the way it looked when she’d asked, “Are you in love with him?” Of all the things Renata was trying to give Millie—toys and ice skating lessons and Sunday trips to historic places—what she had not ever been able to give her was a family. It was not something Renata had even considered before.
Sometimes, like now, the quiet here could be maddening. It kept her awake. She missed the sounds of sirens, of voices in the street below her, the church bells across the street and the noisy trucks collecting garbage, dropping off newspapers. Renata turned on the light and tried to read. But she found herself wondering again what it would feel like to kiss Tom Harper. How those big hands would move across her body. The sound he would make when he had an orgasm. She imagined him as a slightly clumsy lover. Like a teenager, passionate and a little rough.
She tried to focus on the book opened in her hands. It was by an English writer she had never heard of before. She tried to make sense of the words, but she kept thinking of those big hands of Tom’s.
She sat up in bed and said out loud, “This is ridiculous.”
Without thinking about it, she got up and went downstairs to the telephone. The house was not insulated well and felt freezing after her warm bed. Renata shook a little as she dialed. From the cold, she told herself, listening to Tom’s telephone ringing across town.
Was it her imagination or did his voice sound hopeful too? His hello held a funny kind of excitement and it wasn’t until later, after she’d hung up, that Renata realized he was hoping that it was Libby calling, forgetting the time difference, maybe ready to say she’d made a mistake, that she missed him and was coming home.
“Tom,” Renata said. “Hi. It’s me.” Her teeth were chattering. She added, “Renata Handy.”
That made him laugh. “Awake at three in the morning too?” he said.
He had a lovely voice. Not especially deep but there was something in it that was charming, she thought.
“Ben Casey’s on channel five,” he said. “Juvenile diabetes.”
“Listen,” she said, taking a breath. “Why don’t you come here for dinner tomorrow night?”
“Okay,” he said.
It was that easy. She stopped shivering. “Good,” she said. “Good.”
Renata felt like a different person. Like a girl in a book who is making her first dinner for a special man. She made a careful list of what to get. Candles and flowers and perfume and new underwear. She would make beef Stroganoff. He liked red meat. He was always ordering hamburgers and steak when they ate out. She bought new sheets. Masculine ones with bold stripes across them in red and dark blue. She bought albums that made her cry—Patsy Cline singing “Crazy,” an old Joni Mitchell, the Beatles’s Love Songs. She let Millie stay overnight at Rosie Rodriguez’s, which she’d been begging to do.
While she vacuumed and dusted Renata imagined how perfect this plan was. They were supposed to go to see a matinee of Beauty and the Beast tomorrow anyway. Tom would already be here. And they would get in the car and pick up Millie and drive right to the movies together. They would exchange secret looks. In the dark their hands would touch.
Renata looked around the house. Breakfast! she thought suddenly. She put on her coat and drove all the way to Great Barrington for freshly ground coffee and croissants. This must be what it felt like before the prom, she thought. The car filled with the smell of the coffee. The radio was having a Fleetwood Mac hour of music. Renata sang along with Stevie Nicks. When she caught her own reflection in the mirror it surprised her. She had not looked this happy in a long, long time.
Tom took in everything with his eyes. Renata saw in that instant that he was not at all childlike, as she sometimes imagined him. He was very much a man. He knew exactly what she had in mind. His face gave away nothing, but she saw the change in the way he studied her seduction scene.
“I always liked Joni Mitchell,” he said finally.
Renata felt suddenly embarrassed. Somehow she had made herself believe that he was an innocent, that she had to take charge if anything was going to happen between them. But now, standing here awkwardly in the middle of the living room, with most of the lights out and a table set for two and Joni Mitchell singing “Chelsea Morning,” Renata knew that she had been all wrong.
“Smells good,” Tom said. He tossed his jacket on the couch. It was an old jean jacket with a plaid lining. She could almost see him wearing that very same one, leaning against the radiator at the end of the hallway in high school, laughing when she walked by.
“Hey,” he said. His hand cupped her face, the way she had been hoping for so long now.
Renata closed her eyes and leaned into his hand. It was rough, calloused. A hand that changed mufflers and jump-started cars.
“It’s okay,” he said.
She opened her eyes and backed away from him, taking his hand in her own for an instant, then letting it go.
“I don’t know how to say this,” he said. He looked down at the clean floor.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t say it.”
On her way to the kitchen, she flicked on each light switch that she passed.
Dana did not bother to look at the boy who was sitting on the floor in the hallway beside her. She just puffed hard on her cigarette and concentrated on how she was going to get all the way home in the middle of the night.
“I see you here every Saturday night,” the boy said. “You’re always with a different guy and you’re always watching Billy.”
That made her look at him. “What’s it to you?” she said. When she exhaled she made sure a good portion of the smoke hit him in the face.
He laughed. “Nothing,” he said. “I just like to watch. If you want to be a writer you have to observe.” His voice sounded tough. He hesitated over the word observe, as if it was new to him.
Dana looked back at the floor. Her date tonight, whose name she was trying to forget, had been careless and fast. Then he had rolled off her, lit up one of her cigarettes, and said, “Thanks. You don’t mind sort of, you know, getting out pretty soon, do you? I can’t sleep with people I don’t know.” A part of her wanted to scream at him, to say “Who the fuck do you think you are?,” to tear her cigarette out of his mouth. But she was afraid if she tried to talk she would start to cry. Hard. The way she did at home in bed on Sunday nights. So she had waited a few minutes and then she’d wrapped the blanket around her and gotten out of bed and dressed as fast as she could in the dark corner while he sat there and smoked. “Hey,” he’d said as she left, “thanks again.”
“You ever read Jack Kerouac?” the boy was saying.
Dana sighed. “I don’t really feel like talking right now,” she said.
“Where’s Marc?”
“Who?”
The boy laughed again. “Marc? Your date?”
“Marc, my date, is asleep,” she said. “Okay?”
The boy shrugged. “It’s okay with me,” he said.
She went back to feeling sorry for herself. When she finished her cigarette, she lit another one right away.
“So did you?” the boy said.
She looked right into his face. “What are you, dense?” she said. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
He pointed to her cigarette. “That’ll kill you, you know.”
She rolled her eyes. “Who are you? The fucking surgeon general?”
The boy cracked up. He was a real laugher.
“Oh, brother,” she moaned. “What a moron.”
“Let me guess,” he said. “You’re upset about something. Does it have to do with Marc?”
“I wouldn’t waste my time being upset about Marc. Okay?”
“Okay with me. So why are you sitting out here then?”
“Why are you?”
“I just came out to take a leak and I saw you so I thought I’d say hi. I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time, like I said. But I figured you had the hots for Billy and I hate complicated situations since I plan on leaving Massachusetts ASAP.”
Dana could not believe this guy. “Number one,” she said, “I do not have the hots for Billy. Number two, I am also leaving Massachusetts so I have no intention of getting into anything complicated either, and number three you grin and laugh far too much to ever be a serious anything.”
He stuck out his hand for her to shake. “Roald Vachon.”
“Roald?”
“Do you want a ride home or do you plan on sitting here all night?”
Dana sighed again. She shook his hand. “I need a ride,” she said.
Roald grinned at her. “Let’s go.”
Roald reminded her of a giraffe, all tall and skinny with a long neck and yellow hair. He had big teeth. In fact, it looked as if he had too many teeth. And his nose was too long. Despite all this, he was kind of attractive. Maybe it was that stupid grin. When he grinned, it took over his whole face. He became all teeth and mouth. But not in a bad way. His eyes were kind of nice too. Droopy and dark blue, like a lake at night.
His car was a jalopy. Dana had to sit with her feet on the seat because there was a big hole in the floor on her side.
Roald talked the whole way to her house. He was from Lowell, Massachusetts. “Like Kerouac,” he said, all proud as if he had something to do with that. He was in college on a scholarships. He worked at a Cumberland Farms most nights until ten. His father was in prison. “Last time I heard,” Roald said. His mother smoked too much and had emphysema. “Which is exactly what you’ll have if you don’t quit now.” He had a sister who was in a nut house and a brother who was also in prison. “Last time I heard,” he said again.
This all sounded familiar to Dana. Not the details. But the way they were told to her. All rough and proud. The same way she talked about her family, her life. When they finally got to her road, she let him drive her all the way to the house instead of being dropped off and walking the rest of the way as she usually did.
Before she got out of the car, she touched his hand lightly. “You don’t have to talk that way,” she told him. She did not put on her tough voice. She just spoke like herself. “Not to me anyway.”
She saw his Adam’s apple jump around like a yo-yo in his throat. Then he nodded.
“Thanks for the lift,” she said.
He leaned across the seat. “You want to hang out sometime? Maybe like next Saturday?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Cool,” Roald said.
He waited until she got safely in the house before he drove away.
“Hi. Dana?” The voice on the other end of the phone sounded unfamiliar.
“Yeah?” Dana said.
“You don’t know me but I’m a friend of Marc’s. Marc Young?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m actually calling from Dartmouth but I’ll be in Williamstown this weekend visiting some friends and Marc told me you might … uh … show me around.”
Dana was sitting at the kitchen table writing a book report on The Great Gatsby. She studied her notebook. “Jay Gatsby,” she’d written, “spent his whole life trying to get the things it would take for Daisy Buchanan to fall in love with someone like him.”
“Marc said you were … really nice.”
“He did,” Dana said.
“Oh, yes. Absolutely. So I thought maybe Saturday night we could, you know, get together.”
Dana closed her notebook. She imagined all the boys’ faces in front of her own and the image made her queasy. And then something else popped into her mind. That first kiss she ever had, with Mike. When he’d pulled away, there were smudges of green on his face from her witch makeup.
“You asshole,” Dana said. “How dare you? How dare Marc give you this number and how dare you call it?”
“But Marc said—”
“I’m not a dating service here, you know,” she said.
“I—”
“Goodbye, asshole,” Dana said. She hung up fast. She smiled.
Libby waited until Jeremy’s mood improved before she showed him her poems. She came home from work one night and found him in her apartment making chicken satay, threading the meat onto bamboo skewers, mixing the peanut sauce. “Jazz Samba” played on the stereo. That was always a good sign. He even gave her a long kiss hello. “How do you put up with me?” he murmured to her. “I’m such a bear.”
After dinner, when they’d finished a bottle of wine and Jeremy opened another, Libby decided to do it. She got the poems from her underwear drawer. Her hands shook slightly.
“I want to read you something,” she said.
He kissed her neck with those long slow str
okes of his. “I had a breakthrough today,” he said. “Act two cuts right to the heart of the matter now. I pulled it off.”
“That’s great,” Libby said. When he leaned into her, the paper wrinkled between them.
“How does it feel to have such a genius for a lover?”
She laughed, tugging at her poems. She would start right off with the sonnet, she decided.
His thumb circled her nipple. Sometimes Libby wished her brain and her body were better connected, that she could tell herself not to grow wet at his touch, or keep her nipple from hardening and tingling like this until after she’d read him the poems. Bodies always betrayed you, she thought, and carefully dropped the papers, wrinkled and creased now, to the floor.
“When can I read your screenplay?” Libby asked him.
It was very late. Jeremy was in a much better mood, better than she’d seen him in a long time. That meant he felt sexier, and their lovemaking went on longer. His moods were starting to bother her. Even now, lying beside him and feeling sexually satisfied, Libby found herself remembering Tom almost fondly.
Jeremy yawned and stretched. “When it’s done,” he said. That was always his answer.
“You know,” Libby began, “this acting thing isn’t quite working out. I mean, I did get that floor wax commercial …” She swallowed hard, remembering, then continued, “But I think I might get back to my poetry.”
Jeremy didn’t say anything. Even in the dark she could see him staring straight ahead. For a moment she was afraid he had fallen asleep and she nudged him with her elbow.
“Poetry,” he said, his voice flat.
Libby leaned over and turned on the light.
“God,” Jeremy said, “I hate when you do that. Just turn on the light that way.”
“My husband could sleep with the overhead light on. I’d stay up and read and it never even bothered him.”
“Ah!” Jeremy said, “the mechanic. Or was he a saint?”
Libby pulled the sheet around her, covering herself. Jeremy had told her that Kathleen wore white cotton gloves all the time, even to bed. Harpists, he’d told her, have to be very careful about their hands. At the time, she had shuddered, remembering Tom’s grease-covered hands. The contrast had seemed important. But now she almost missed them, and could remember quite clearly the way they gripped a football or held a bat, the way they felt the first time he touched her breasts.