Keepers

by Gary A Braunbeck

  Shoving the buck into my pocket so the lint would have some company, I smiled at her and said: “You were telling me something about your being easy in high school?”

  “Easy? I was a slut. If I’d stayed in college, I’d probably be a real piece—”

  “—like you already weren’t?”

  “—of work, smartass. I’d be a real piece of work. I spent way too much time in way too many beds trying to convince myself I was worth something. If a guy even hinted that he liked me, I’d pretty much let him do whatever he wanted.”

  “I kind of suspected that after you banged the orderly that time in the hospital so he’d take us to the animal lab. Well, that, and when I saw you with that bozo at the gas station the first time you took me home for dinner.”

  “I’m not like that anymore. Since the abortion last year, I’ve been very careful about who I … you know … I mean, I haven’t been with a guy in that way since… .”

  She wasn’t on the verge of tears—Beth almost never cried—but there was a thinness to her voice, a vulnerability that both surprised and scared me.

  I touched her face. “You don’t have to explain any of this to me. I understand how things were. It never mattered to me. It still doesn’t.”

  She turned her face into my hand, kissing the palm. “That’s just so goddamn typical of you.”

  “What? Did I do something untoward? Did I say the wrong thing? Did I let fly with a whopper of a fart and just not notice—what?”

  “You accept me for who and what I am. You always have. Whenever one of those dick-for-brains boyfriends of mine would treat me like shit, or embarrass me, or stand me up for a date, you always said or did the right thing to make it better. I could never really hurt when I was with you. Sometimes, just knowing that all I’d have to do—it didn’t matter who I was with or where we were or whatever kind of trouble I getting into—all I had to do was pick up the phone and call you and you’d make everything better.”

  “Okay. And …?”

  She stared at me for a moment, then slightly shook her head. “And you have no idea how great a thing that is, do you? You have no idea how wonderful you really are. All you can see are your weaknesses and failures. You don’t see how strong you are already, how strong you’ve always been. Christ, when I first met you in the hospital I thought you were, like, my age. Sure, you were built about the size of a nine-year-old, but when you looked at a person—when you looked at me—you were so much older than you should have been. Even now, looking into your eyes, you seem so much older than I am. Haven’t you ever noticed how people can’t keep eye contact with you during a conversation?”

  “Always figured it was because I had something stuck in my teeth—”

  “Shut. Up. You listen now. People can’t keep eye contact with you because you see through all the scrims and bullshit. Whether you mean to or not, you just don’t look at a person, you look right into the middle of who they really are and people can’t handle that.”

  “That explains my jam-packed social calendar.”

  “See? Just then, that remark—‘My jam-packed social calendar.’ How many seventeen-year-old guys do you know who say things like that? And wasn’t there an ‘untoward’ in there earlier? Don’t answer, it wasn’t really a question.”

  “What’s going on here, Beth? I’m confused.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re one of the most un-confused people I’ve ever known. I think everything is very clear to you.”

  I held up the birthday card. “This isn’t.”

  “Yes, it is. You just don’t want to admit it.”

  “Admit what?”

  “That you love me.”

  I sighed in exasperation. “I already said I did! That’s what started this … this …this goddamn dialogue exchange from a Harold Pinter play. You’re my best friend and I love you.”

  “But you don’t only love me as a friend, do you?”

  (Mayday, Mayday, sonar has malfunctioned, there’s an unexpected obstacle outside the cabin window and—)

  —and there it was.

  She’d blindsided me and she knew it. Had it been that obvious all these years and I was just too stupid to know I’d been wearing all my feelings on my sleeve?

  Staring into her soft-brown, gold-flecked eyes I was as utterly and deliciously helpless as any teenager in love has ever been. “You’re twenty-four, Beth.”

  “You make it sound ancient.”

  “How would it look to your friends? Christ, I’m just a baby as far as they’re concerned.”

  “Leave them out of it for now, okay? Fuck ’em. Right now, right here, I want to know your feelings for me.”

  What surprised me the most was how quickly I answered, and the ease with which the words came out of my mouth: “I’ve been in love with you since that day you brought two of your friends into my room at the hospital and kissed me in front of them. I was in love with you long before you held my hand for the first time, or told me a secret, or took me to your house, or slipped your arm through mine while we wandered around King’s Island. The first time I saw you in your hip-huggers and a halter-top I thought I’d implode from how beautiful you were. Do you have any idea how much I wanted to kill that guy at the gas station because he got to hold you and kiss you and all I could do was sit there and watch him do it? You haven’t dated one guy that I didn’t immediately want to run over with a power mower just to hear him scream. Whenever you hug me, I won’t wash the shirt for a week because the smell of your musk oil lingers in the material. All my life girls have either made fun of me or treated me like I was their brother. My first kiss I got only because I was at a party playing ‘Spin the Bottle’—it pointed at Linda McDonald, who was the new girl at school and didn’t know I was the class joke. The only girl who’s ever kissed me like she meant it is you. I’m never really happy unless you’re around, or I know that I’ll be seeing you soon. When I’m an old man sitting in a nursing home with oatmeal dribbling down my chin, I’m gonna bore the piss out of the nurses because I’ll keep telling them over and over about this girl named Beth who was the great love of my life, but because she was also my best friend I did the noble thing and let her slip away.

  “Whoever you wind up with, whichever guy out there has the brains to know he’s just met the greatest woman in the world the first time he meets you …the two of you can be together for sixty, seventy years, you can have dozens of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and build the most unbelievably fantastic life together. But when you’re holding his hand at the end and looking into his eyes and seeing him remember the richness and fulfillment and joy he’s known because his life has been spent by your side, at that moment, that very moment, he won’t come close to loving you half as much as I do, right here, right now. So, yeah, Beth, I love you, and I’m in love with you, and nothing you’ve said or done in the past has changed that, and nothing you can say or do now is going to change it. There? Happy now?”

  “Actually,” she said, slipping her arms around my neck, “I am. Very happy. Because I love you, too. And I figure that if you’re going to lose your virginity, Gil, it should be to me.”

  Earlier, when I said the first kiss Beth gave me that day was the one against which all others would be compared and come up lacking …I was wrong. The kiss she gave me at that moment, a kiss just as soft and warm and deep and long and moist as the first, but this time with the hint of hunger on the tip of its tongue and a heat around it that you experience once and once only in your life if you’re lucky, because it’s a heat that burns into the core of your heart and tells you that this is it, kiddo, run for cover, this is the Real Thing, Take No Prisoners, give it up, you’re doomed, because Love has just kicked your teeth down your throat, ain’t it grand?—this kiss was the one whose summer taste and autumn passion would linger on my lips for all the rest of my days.

  When she pulled away—not taking her arms from around my neck—we both let out a long, hot, staggered breat
h. She pressed her forehead against mine and stroked the back of my neck, swallowing once before saying, “Oh, my,” ending that second word on a smoothly descending note of embarrassed laughter that snuggled down in the back of her throat and wrapped itself up in something like a purr; I could almost feel her voice with my fingertips.

  “Just wait until I’m legal, huh?”

  “Oh, I think we passed the ‘waiting’ part about thirty seconds ago.” She lifted her head and looked into my eyes again. “Before I picked you up today, I rented a hotel room downtown. Can I take you there? Can we leave right now?”

  She’d bought two boxes of condoms (three to a pack, and we still called them “rubbers”) and bet me a year’s worth of back rubs that I couldn’t last through one box. I made it all the way through the first one from the second box before she and I didn’t so much fall asleep as pass out. I say this not to boast (c’mon, I was seventeen and a virgin; most days I was so horny the crack of dawn wasn’t safe) but to give you some idea of how gloriously unhinged the whole experience was. It was romantic and primal, awkward and embarrassing, spectacular and funny, life-affirming and depressing as hell, always surprising (she did things with me I didn’t think two bodies were capable of doing, even with lubricants), and even a little …mystifying. We fell out of bed laughing, we got a little mushy, a lot dirty, very sweaty, and ultimately so sore neither of us walked very fast or very straight for a day or two afterward.

  It was wonderful.

  And I think I knew the truth about the whole thing before we’d even finished dressing afterward.

  “You’re giving me a look,” she said. “Why did you do this, Beth?”

  “Because I wanted to.”

  I tied my shoelaces and looked at the floor. I didn’t want to see her face when she answered the next question. “This doesn’t mean what I think it means, does it?”

  “What do you think it … no. No, kiddo. And I’m sorry.”

  “Then why?”

  “Because I needed to …to be with a guy who loved me.” She placed her hand against the small of my back. “You don’t hate me, do you?”

  “No.” Which was a lie. At that moment I don’t think I’d hated anyone or anything more, but I also knew I’d get over it. This was Beth, after all.

  A few nights later at dinner Dad remarked that Beth seemed like a decent girl and I should count myself lucky to have found her. Then he looked across the table at Mom and smiled, and my mother actually blushed.

  I was stunned. For as long as I could remember, they’d never displayed any tenderness or affection for one another in front of me—as far as I cared to imagine, they’d never displayed any in private, either. They were Just Mom and Dad, the people who raised me and paid for my clothes and put a roof over my head and sent me to school and never missed a chance to remindme that everything Ihad was because of them.I knew that parents were just like any other couple, that there was love and affection and all of that, but these were my folks, for the love of God. My folks never talked about anything like this—hell, the only time anything more than the day’s trivialities were ever brought up was when Dad was on a drunk and shouting at the top of his lungs about the bills or the condition of the house or how the goddamn company was going to fuck over the union with the next contract.

  But this little flirtatious display over the meatloaf…this was just weird. It made me nervous. And a little queasy.

  I went to bed that night without setting them straight about Beth and me. I think my dad was just glad to know that I liked girls.

  Later—I guess it must have been two or two-thirty in the morning—I woke up with one of those middle-of-the-night cases of dry mouth that make you think you’re going to die within seconds if you don’t get something to drink right now, and went downstairs to get a glass of juice from the fridge. The living room was dark as I passed by but it felt like someone was in there. Probably Dad. Again. They’d been screwing with his hours at the plant and as a result he hadn’t gotten back on anything close to a normal sleeping schedule yet. Most nights he’d toss and turn for hours until he woke Mom, who’d make him come downstairs and do his tossing and turning on the sofa. He was usually cranky as hell whenever this happened, so I walked very softly and decided not to turn on the kitchen lights. I drank my juice, quietly rinsed out the glass and set it in the sink, and was starting back toward the stairs when I heard Dad say, in a voice so tired and sad it froze me where I stood: “Did I ever tell you that when I was a kid, I wanted to raise chickens for a living?”

  I couldn’t have been more anxious if I’d run into an armed burglar. Talks between Dad and me never ended well—one of us always wound up accusing the other of being too pushy or disrespectful or whatever—and the idea of getting into it with him at this hour, especially considering how upset he sounded, made me cringe.

  Then I heard Mom reply: “Only about a hundred times, hon. But if you want to talk about it again, go ahead.”

  When had she come down? I would have heard her—the steps squeaked and groaned like something out of a haunted-house movie. I was surprised that Dad hadn’t lit into me about making so much noise coming down here.

  Then it occurred to me that maybe the two of them had been sitting in there the whole time since I’d gone to bed, that maybe Dad was genuinely upset about something other than the usual list of complaints and Mom, to keep the peace, had decided to sit in there and let him talk it out, however long it took.

  Something in their respective tones baffled me; they were talking to one another not as my parents, but as a husband and wife.

  I realized then that, until the incident at dinner tonight, I’d never actually thought of them as being that way—husband and wife—only as Mom and Dad. It was kind of fascinating, and in my best What-the-Hell-Are-You-Doing? skulk, I crept out of the kitchen and hid myself in the shadows on the stairway. They couldn’t see me there, I was pretty sure, but I had a clear view of their silhouettes against the window, where the curtain glowed a dull blue against the diffuse street light trying to sneak in from outside.

  Mom was sitting in her chair next to the fireplace and Dad was on the old leather ottoman that should have been put out of its misery years ago. He was leaning forward, elbows on knees, holding his pipe in one hand. If the curtains had been open, he would have been staring out the window, but I knew he’d just been sitting there staring at the curtains as if imagining something really interesting on the other side. I’d seen him do this too many times to count. I always wondered what he thought about as he sat in the dark staring at a set of closed curtains. Why not just open the damn things? At least the view of the street might change if a car or dog or neighbor wandered by.

  “You gonna tell me what’s bothering you?” asked Mom.

  “It’s stupid.”

  “Not if it’s got you upset like this, it isn’t.”

  Dad fired up his pipe, then pointed toward where I was hiding with its glowing red bowl. “He must think I’m some kind of asshole.”

  “I don’t think he feels that way. He maybe doesn’t understand you, but he doesn’t think ill of you.”

  “What about you?”

  “You’re my husband and I love you.”

  “C’mon. I’m not drunk so I’m not gonna throw a fit—answer the question.”

  “I think you act like a real bastard when you’ve been drinking—but it doesn’t make you a bastard. That’s something you really have to work at.”

  Dad chuckled, puffing on his pipe. Even from where I was hiding, I could smell the sweet cherry-flavored tobacco.

  “Think he’ll remember much about us after we’re gone?”

  Mom pulled in a little gasp of air, then said: “Don’t you go talking like that. We may not be as young as we used to be, but I’m not shopping for burial plots just yet.”

  “That’s because you don’t have to, remember? We paid for them damn things—what was it?—ten, fifteen years ago?”

  “Oh.”

/>   “Oh, she says.” He shook his head. “Think a person’d remember something like that.”

  Mom readjusted her position in the chair, then asked: “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong or not?”

  Dad puffed on his pipe again, then wiped the back of his arm over his face. “I told you, it’s stupid.”

  “How about you let me decide that for myself?”

  He looked straight at her. “It’s just, I been thinkin’ about when I was a kid, how I’d always get a whole dime once a month to go spend however I wanted. Shit, I had seven different paper routes I worked, and I handed every penny over to Mom so she could buy groceries and pay the bills—”

  “—I remember the Depression, hon. We’re the same age, as I recall.”

  “A dime was a small fortune back then. But Mom, she insisted that once a month I take a dime and go to the movies on Sunday. I could see a triple-feature with cartoons and get popcorn and a soda and still have three cents left for ice cream or something. I used to love those times, y’know. ‘Downtown Sunday’ was a big thing for me. I’d go to the Midland or the Auditorium for the movies, then walk around the square. Those’re some of the best memories I have.

  “Anyway, there was this one corner downtown with this old building, and every Sunday I’d see the same three old guys sitting on the steps, sharing a newspaper or splitting up sandwiches, passing around some beer, and they always had this raggedy-ass fat old hound dog with ’em. I didn’t know which one of ’em owned the thing, but it never gave me any trouble so I never asked. But any time that dog’d see me coming, he’d waddle over and then just sit there and look at me with those sad eyes—thing looked like it was coming down off a drunk most of the time. I’d usually give it some leftover popcorn or a piece of my sandwich or whatever I picked up after the movie, and it’d eat it, then lick my hand and waddle back over to those three old guys. They always waved at me and I’d wave back. It was like part of my Downtown Sunday routine, you know?

  “I thought it was great that here you had these old guys who’d meet each other on them steps and pass the better part of the day with their paper, and their stories, maybe playing checkers or something … and they always had that damn dog to keep things interesting. I mean, there was people who’d walk by and make fun of them, or try not to laugh at ’em ’cause they thought they was, you know, funny in the head or something. But I never laughed at ’em or made fun or anything. They had a place to go and spend good time with their friends. I thought that was just … just great.” His voice was growing thin, unsteady. He took a few more puffs from his pipe and as he did, Mom leaned forward.