Homesick Creek

by Diane Hammond

  She accepted it.

  For as long as she could remember, Bunny had been sensitive about other people’s appearances, especially when they looked better than she did. When people told her over and over how cute Vinny was, and later on how pretty, she’d considered it a mixed compliment. It wasn’t that she minded Vinny’s being pretty; it was that she minded her being prettier than Bunny had been. Bunny had never been what you would call a pretty girl exactly; it was her figure that got her the looks, small in the hips, long in the legs, and just busty enough to pull off any top. She took excellent care of her breasts, always buying bras that gave good support; plus she’d bottle-fed Vinny when she was a baby, so she wouldn’t sag like those women in Africa who looked like they’d had their boobs sucked dry and then ironed. Those women were a cautionary tale, as Bunny had told Anita on more than one occasion. If it came down to it, Bunny would rather have a plate in her lower lip or a stack of gold rings around her neck.

  Anita had never been much competition for Bunny. It was one of the reasons they’d done so well together all these years. Bunny secretly believed that she would have beaten out Anita at the Miss Harrison County Pageant if she’d entered that year. Anita had been voluptuous, full of curves and bosom, but she hadn’t been pretty. LeeAnn Sprague, who’d won, hadn’t been all that good-looking either. Bunny was sure she’d have turned heads if she’d walked down that runway, but Shirl had nixed it. Shirl had nixed a lot of things that year, hoping that keeping Bunny close to home would prevent her from running off with JoJo. A lot of good it had done. She hadn’t run off with JoJo, but three years later she’d had Vinny. Shirl had just sighed and shaken her head when Bunny finally told her she was nearly five months gone. “I knew you couldn’t let him get away clean,” Shirl had said. “It’s an old trick, hon, but it don’t work, and it never has. You’d think after so many centuries girls would’ve figured that out.”

  It wouldn’t have done any good to tell Shirl—and JoJo, if he’d given her a chance—that she wanted a baby about as much as she coveted a dead herring. No, Vinny was the product of a defective Trojan that JoJo busted right through one night in his orgasmic zeal. When he pulled out of her and she saw those shreds of rubber, she knew she was well and truly fucked. In Hubbard when girls got pregnant, they had their babies. They had their babies and they lived at home as long as they needed to—permanently, in more than a few cases—and year by year their color faded and their eyes got sullen and one way or another they took a 180-degree turn away from everything they’d once thought they’d be: a stewardess, a rich fisherman’s wife, a telephone operator, a nurse. They weren’t anything at all except somebody’s mother and maybe the wife of someone who wasn’t anything either. Bunny knew that her life was over the night her water broke all over her favorite chintz vanity stool. She endured thirty hours of labor with no one but Shirl and Anita in the waiting room, plus a torn perineum and stretch marks that lasted down the years no matter what she did with cocoa butter and baby oil. At least she hadn’t had a cesarean section like Anita had had with Patrick and then Doreen, a big, ugly scar that said, Open here , like some kind of a party favor.

  Yet Vinny had had the softest head, the most beautiful cap of curls when she was small. Bunny could still remember cradling that small pulsing skull in the palm of her hand and wondering how God could send down one of His most cherished possessions in such a fragile package. Vinny had been a sprite from the get-go, pretty and cheerful and eager to please. At first it was Bunny she’d tried to please, but then later it had been Hack. Vinny thought Hack hung the moon. If she was with Bunny and Hack together, she outshone Bunny every time, at least in Hack’s eyes. She’d seen him; she’d watched. All these years that had been her special hell: to know he was in love with her daughter. A mother was supposed to be her daughter’s best friend, but with Bunny and Vanilla it had never been that way, and Bunny didn’t think it was all her fault. She and Shirl were close; Fanny and her daughter, Chantelle, were always going out shopping and to lunch or something. But Vinny was always out someplace with her girlfriends, and the few times Bunny had tried to set up something—dinner and a movie for just the two of them, or lunch together at the Bobcat over in Sawyer—Vinny always put it off until Bunny just gave up. That’s just the way it was between them. They’d never meshed, and now they probably never would. Bunny could live with that except when Hack brought up that he’d been on the phone with Vinny or up there for a visit, like he was a better parent than her. He hadn’t been the one who’d gotten kicked in the ribs so hard from the inside out that during her pregnancy Bunny had had to sleep sitting up for a month. He hadn’t stayed up with her all night when she had colic in the beginning or when she got pneumonia and a double ear infection all at the same time. He hadn’t scrounged for money or bought clothes only for her when there wasn’t enough money to buy for them both. He hadn’t done any of that, but somehow he’d turned into Mr. PTA anyway, the Good Dad, the perfect stepparent; that was what everyone always said about him. Bunny , people always told her, you’re the luckiest woman in the world to have found that man, but hey, you already know that. It wasn’t easy being married to a man who was better-looking than you, more likable than you, and who attracted women like iron filings to a magnet. There were always women, and there always had been, with Hack. It didn’t make a bit of difference what he told her. She knew what she knew.

  This latest girl, this prissy piece of merchandise, had been sitting in a booth at the Bobcat just two days ago like Queen Shit—and in their booth, hers and Hack’s. Bunny made sure to keep Hack there long enough for the woman to get good and soaked walking all the way back to the dealership in the rain. Her perfume, some thick, sweet stuff that smelled like pastry, had stayed behind. Bunny could still smell it sometimes, even days later, like it had gotten wedged up her nose as a reminder. Hack could swear nothing was going on between them—and he did, over and over—but he’d gone white when he saw Bunny come in. Well, she’d caught him all right. She’d caught him, and now she was holding him, playing him out like a fish on a line. When she got hurt, it made her mean. Hack knew that. That’s why he was being so sweet now, bringing her beers, watching TV with her. Same old same old, the way he always atoned for his sins. What would she do the day he no longer cared enough to bother?

  If every day you thought about committing murder, did that make you a murderer, at least in your soul? If so, then Rae Macy was an adulteress, and no amount of protestation and hairsplitting would change it. Though she was only mentally wanton, this thing between her and Hack Neary, this love or lust, was so solid, so real you could walk across a bridge of it all the way to China.

  She would have thought that such a great sin, such a moral transgression would at least return equal parts of pleasure and pain, but it wasn’t so. The obsession went on and on, with none of the relief or release of consummated sex, but all the retribution. Bovine Francine, with her GED certificate and her grade-school handwriting, was now forgetting to pass along Rae’s phone messages—all except the ones from Sam, which recorded the caller as Sam, your husband. Whenever Rae walked by Francine’s desk, which lately was as infrequently as possible, Francine gave her a nasty smirk. In fact the only people at the dealership who did not seem to regard her with contempt were Hack himself and Bob. No, there was Jesús too, with his touching belief that there was such a thing as goodness. To judge by the stair step ages of their children, La Reina must have been pregnant during all but a few months of their marriage. She had a fierce Aztec face and the short legs and powerful build of a wrestler, a woman with corners instead of curves. Yet Rae had seen Jesús look at her with unqualified adoration when she stopped by sometimes to bring him lunch. How did a man develop such a love, the deepest desire of the soul as well as the body? When he and La Reina talked, he always put his head close to hers and spoke quietly, even intimately. What did he say to her? Rae imagined beautiful couplets, a continuous song of humility and gratitude. What would it be like, to b
e loved in that way, to have a man grasp and hold you with his eyes until he’d memorized every cell, every molecule? She would have liked to ask Jesús these questions, but her Spanish and his English were too poor, and besides, he was a simple man, a man in command of inarticulable truths: gladness, honor, joy. This morning he had shyly presented her with his latest pictures of la reina y los niños on the occasion of his oldest son’s first communion. The child was dressed like a cheap lounge act, but he regarded the camera with serenity, a boy at peace with himself and his place in the world around him, a state from which Rae was increasingly a stranger.

  She often dreamed now about leaving her house unclothed. Sometimes she arrived at Fred Meyer naked; at other times she was fully, elegantly dressed, but only from the waist up. When Sam was at work and she was not, she’d taken to driving blindly up and down the coast highway in a fug of stale longing and cheap sentiment. She’d put nearly a thousand miles on the car in three months.

  Overwhelmed by misery, Rae had talked to Sam about how out of step she felt, about how she was being ostracized because she wasn’t like everybody else, how neither her graduate degrees nor her sense of style seemed to mean anything to anyone in Sawyer even though those things defined her. Yes, she had perhaps ruffled some feathers by befriending men, but what was she supposed to do when these narrow Sawyer women would have nothing to do with her? She’d told him this as though Vernon Ford were teeming with high-spirited men with whom she glibly jousted and punned and discussed politics. “Honey, you’re losing me. Exactly who is it that we’re talking about?” Sam had asked mildly, trying to inform her vague statements with fact, and she’d whispered Hack Neary’s name, and Bob’s as a decoy, with a burning face.

  Sam hadn’t known what to make of it, of course, except to point out mildly that she’d always valued diversity, and Sawyer was nothing if not diverse, at least in socioeconomic terms. Couldn’t she learn from these people, put what she found to some use? But Rae didn’t want to learn from these people. All she wanted, really, was to play out her tawdry little obsession in private. Not that she could say that, of course, and then it had gotten late and Sam had had an early court appearance the next morning, and the conversation hadn’t so much ended as guttered out. Rae was left wondering what she might have given away that she would later come to regret. She was in the habit lately of replaying all her conversations and dealings with Sam. His mind was encyclopedic, a strangely efficient data storage system that indexed and cataloged even the most obscure information. One of his law school professors had said that Sam was the most highly evolved attorney he had ever seen, perfectly adapted to the dusty bins and endless shelves that were the law. Sam could recall in detail conversations that Rae couldn’t even remember having, quoting as meticulously as though he was reading from a text. Yet he was at best only a fair judge of character. He could cite information chapter and verse, but he often missed the subtext. He was most at home with dry, bureaucratic matters: contested deeds, right-of-way disputes, articles of incorporation, contract law. There were times when Rae felt parched by the desert landscape of his mind, but she also had to admit it allowed her great psychic privacy. He could no more see inside her soul than perform miracles in the village square.

  During her solitary drives up and down the highway, she sometimes thought that their relationship, hers and Sam’s, was a mealy thing, without the glue and effervescence of bloodlust. There had been no wild nights, no weekends of sex from which they’d emerged groggy with pheromones, raw and stinking like zoo animals. Theirs was a gentlemanly, civilized affection that had developed during talks on many subjects. Sam had a lively intellect and the broad knowledge of a voracious reader; Rae always felt that she was a step or two behind him, the eager student rather than peer.

  With Hack Neary, on the other hand, Rae gladly suffered ridiculous chatter about neighbors and dirt bikes and salmon bakes and sex, thinking all the while about how much she would like to run her tongue around the inside of his mind, lick it clean with her spit and adoration, then rebuild what she found there until it sang like fine crystal. She was reasonably sure he was not a stupid man. But where Sam lived all up in his head, Hack was a primitive, a throwback to times of brawn and guts and lustiness, where you seized what you would. He was Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark, a pioneer pushing westward with two oxen and a bolt of cloth, weevily flour and a single Dutch oven. His instincts were highly developed. Sam did not have instincts; he had taste.

  Six years ago they had been married in quiet elegance in the front parlor of his parents’ exquisitely restored Victorian house in San Francisco. Sam’s father was a retired history professor whose specialty was Victorian America. He had used his house as the central metaphor for a well-received book on Victorian values and the self. He was a man of beautiful manners and formal turns of speech, and just before the wedding ceremony was to take place, he had asked Rae to step into a small butler’s pantry he used as his office, so that he could speak with her in private. She had had a spray of baby’s breath in her hair, and when he lifted a hand to adjust its blossoms, she had misunderstood his intentions and turned away. Stricken, he said that he had only wanted to wish her, in private, happiness and long life with his son. My God, did she think he had intended to kiss her? She had stumbled through an agony of self-abasement and mortification, but they had never been entirely comfortable with each other again. And Sam was very much like his father, a man of ironclad morality and lukewarm lusts. Until recently they had made love comfortably, pleasantly, sometimes even wryly, as though their sexuality were a bit of evolutionary foolishness, the vestigial remains of their Cro-Magnon heritage. But for the last few months Rae had been repulsed by his touch, dreading the inevitable invitation that would come from beside her in the dark: Would you care to share a roll? They used to laugh about that silly turn of phrase, invariably asking each other the question in front of the baked goods section of the student union cafeteria, as their private joke. Now it made her flesh crawl.

  So she drove her obsession north along the coast highway to Hubbard in hopes of catching a glimpse of Hack or even of his truck. Once she’d even driven by his home, a dangerous thing since he lived just two houses from the end of a dead-end street, and his wife would recognize Rae if she saw her. She had risked it, though, taking in with appalled reverence the chain saw bear carvings and climbing bear silhouettes in the front yard, the cheap frilly curtains and mailbox painted like a rabbit, its raisable ears acting as flags for the postman. It was a fussy house, a woman’s house, Bunny’s house more than Hack’s, Rae guessed. She drove on with her heart pounding, terrified of being caught, knowing that this time she’d gone too far. As she turned around, she saw a pickup coming toward her up the hill, and for a minute she was sure it was Hack’s truck, that he’d know she’d sunk to spying on him. It had turned out to be someone else, in a truck that looked nothing like Hack’s, but she drove home deeply shaken.

  If Sam had had an affair, or contemplated one, it would have made her feel better in some obscure way, but she didn’t think he had the imagination for it, or the desire. She was the overheated one of the two of them, with her secret thong panties and the lace teddies she bought on a trip alone to Portland on a day when she knew Sam couldn’t go with her. She had gotten that far out of control. She waxed her legs every second Monday, wore an expensive perfume she had picked out and bought for herself. She experimented with cosmetics that enhanced her pale, fairy complexion until she looked like she was made of silk or marble, an acolyte offering up her immaculate beauty as part of some perverse cosmic contract with God.

  She would not leave Sam if He would allow her to seduce Hack Neary.

  chapter thirteen

  Hack hadn’t sold a car in a week—a week and a day, to be exact, ever since he and Bunny had turned to shit at the Bobcat. He knew his sales patter was lackluster, his enthusiasm forced. People could read that plain as day and knew you weren’t at the top of your game. You’d think that would
make them zero in for the kill, but they didn’t. It seemed unsportsmanlike. They were happy to kick your ass, eager to kick your ass, but they wanted you to be in peak condition when they did it. They wanted you to break a sweat, writhe in pain, cry out for mercy. Old Marv Vernon had been masterful, right down to the groans, the lowered head, the hangdog expression. If all my customers were like you, he liked to tell them, I’d be waiting tables right now. God only knows what I’ll tell my wife .

  What it came down to was, Hack Neary didn’t bounce back like he used to. Bunny had whipped him good, and here was the thing he was beginning to think: If he was going to be hammered for having an affair, he might as well have an affair. It wasn’t like the sex at home was any good anymore. And he was already paying the price of choosing the wrong company for lunch. It had been eight days since Bunny had found him with Rae at the Bobcat, and when he’d walked by her sewing room last night, the machine had still been open full throttle, racketing along like a jackhammer. He pictured her feeding some poor Hack rabbit under the sewing foot without even slowing down, stitching him shut from his balls to his eyebrows. That’s what he’d become, the Hack Neary Voodoo Bunny.

  But—and this was the worst part, the truly depressing part— he didn’t really want to have an affair. He didn’t know what he did want, but it wasn’t sex on the side, not even with someone as beautiful as Rae Macy. What the hell? He couldn’t remember the last time a problem had been too big to be solved by sex. Sex was the answer to everything. You got your parts all slicked up and perky, and the rest just drifted away on a tide of slow orgasmic bliss. By the time it was over, you were too fuck-drunk to care.