by Brad Barkley
She had forgotten the odor of this kind of labor, of paint and caulk and paste. A clean, familiar smell. All at once, she realized she’d also forgotten to put a tarp down, and already she had spattered the carpet some, but she didn’t mind. She could clean it up later; for now, she didn’t want to stop, wanted to keep going over the red spray paint and making those words disappear, making the attack itself disappear. She moved the roller in neat, straight swaths, listening to the wet shush it made against the background of Lem’s humming.
The words came back. Almost as soon as she’d finished the wall, the red paint began seeping through, the words fuck and suck becoming faintly visible.
“Unless you seal it,” Lem said, watching her, “they’ll keep coming back. Just give it three, maybe four coats. That should do it.”
She left the wall to dry and went downstairs to the den, stepping over the torched books at the foot of the stairs. Thank God those on the shelves hadn’t been touched, only this pile which had sat on the coffee table. How could anyone do that? To a book? A few semesters back, she’d taught Western civ II, and she spent a whole class period talking about the Nazi book-burning campaigns, coupling it with newspaper articles about recent efforts to ban Huck Finn and a handful of kids’ books. Her students responded with blank stares and yawns. They didn’t care the least about books or what books meant. For the first time ever, she raised her voice to a class and sent them away before the period ended. The next day, in an attempt to get through to them, she showed the movie Fahrenheit 451, which she remembered having scared her to death as a teenager. As it happened, it was also the day Ernie picked to do his yearly surprise observation of faculty. Later, in his office, she’d tried to explain while he sat grinning at her, telling her he liked the idea of a history course that covered future events.
“In fact,” he said, “when you get around to your proposal for that approximate history course—”
“Shut up,” she said, smiling.
“No, really, you ought to do a whole unit on the future. The fun part, you know, will be the pop quizzes on stuff that hasn’t happened yet.”
She smiled now remembering it, wondering how the new semester was going, who they’d gotten to take her sections. The shelf above the TV slowly filled as she reshelved the books, trying to remember what order they’d been in. All the trash went into the fireplace, and then she ran the vacuum over the rug. Back upstairs, Lem and Pammy were taping over the joints of the new wallboard they’d installed, and Alison gave the graffiti another coat of latex. Pammy went with her to the kitchen, where they worked on their hands and knees, pulling up the ruined linoleum. As they worked, she couldn’t help but notice how strong Pammy was, her arms hard and sinewy, biceps like small oranges stitched under her skin.
They finally took a break to eat from the cooler Pammy had packed, pimento cheese sandwiches, peanut butter crackers, and Gatorade. They didn’t talk while they ate; they just sat looking out the window or at the work they had finished. Conversation used to flow easily with the four of them together, out on the deck on a Saturday evening, Pammy and Lem’s son, still little, asleep on the couch inside, Marty cooking fish on the grill while Lem sat holding bottle rockets in his fingertips and lighting them with Pammy’s cigarette to shoot them into the treetops, and the evening would smell like citronella candles and beer. Now they sat mostly in silence, commenting occasionally on how cool this summer had been, or how paint could brighten up a place.
By early evening, the living room was roughly back into shape, and the curse words were finally covered. If only progress on her car could happen this fast. Lem stood with his hands on his wide hips, looking all around the room and nodding his approval of their work.
“Why don’t you let us finish up tomorrow?” Lem said, winding one of the extension cords around his elbow. “We’ll go on, and you can take it easy.”
This sounded good, in fact, and she took him up on it. She had been here a little more than five hours, and she reassured Pammy that Max would be there soon to pick her up. She saw them exchanging looks, and figured they had decided that she needed this, some time alone in her house. She gave them each an awkward hug. How to tell them that Marty no longer existed here for her, that her old life felt as broken and burned as all her belongings? She went upstairs to shower and change, finding some of her old clothes, sweatpants and an Orioles T-shirt, packed in her dresser. By the time she got out, Lem and Pammy were gone, the house quiet.
She remembered some of the things left in their basement, things that she had ignored or resented at the time, Marty hauling in yet another bag from Lowe’s or Sears. But now that she thought of it, many of those tools might be useful for her Corvette—screwdrivers, pliers, socket wrenches, electrical tape. She clicked on the switches at the top of the landing and started down the wobbly stairs into the gloom. Her fingers rode the slick banister, and as she moved down past the narrow stairwell walls, she leaned over and squinted through the prickly light toward the corner workbench, and there was Marty.
It was a relief, really, to see him. All day, she’d chastised herself as heartless and empty, unable to draw him up in her memory. But there he sat, as full and real in her mind, in this undisturbed part of the house, as if he’d never left, as if the past two years had been some minor disturbance not worth bothering him with. She saw the tight creases of his dirty jeans as he sat, legs splayed, at his bar stool, leaning over his work, a thin tassel of smoke rising from his soldering iron into the light, some ruined old radio gutted on the bench, that one unruly shock of hair dangling across his forehead and into his vision. Of course this is where she would see him. Of course she hadn’t found him in the rest of the house; he’d barely lived there. Now he was clear enough for her to see every detail: the strips of black tape he stuck to his forearm when he worked, keeping them within reach; the ragged neck of his T-shirt; the stripe of his boxer shorts peeking out over his jeans; the muscle in his back; the way he spoke to the radio as he worked on it, urging it to cooperate. Memory animated him, brought his fingers to the controls of the tape player hung from the Peg-Board, brought the rough curve of his hand to his coffee mug, made the dusty tip of his boot move in time with the music which she heard now, too, the old rock songs about women and love. Other sounds spooled out through memory, her feet on the floorboards overhead, her voice calling Marty upstairs to dinner, telling him the food was getting cold, or asking him when he might come to bed. She watched him lean back far enough to shout at the joists, then bend forward again, muttering words she still could not hear.
Her hands shook as she closed the door at the top of the stairs and clicked off the lights. She wiped her eyes and leaned against the closed door.
Outside, the street was awash in the pale yellow-purple of evening. Where was Max? Why was he taking so long? On the living room wall, the faded words had begun to reappear through the paint. She could not stay in this house. That had been true two years ago, and it was still true. More true now. She left and paced up and down the street, trying to calm her hands, letting her mind run through everything she could remember about Chaucer: born in thirteen something. Thirty? Forty? Around the time that the Black Death killed just about everyone, she remembered. He began Canterbury Tales the same year he was robbed twice. What year? Which happened first? She couldn’t recall, and didn’t much care anymore. Instead, she ran through a list of parts she needed from Mr. Beachy. This was easier—all she had to do was think of the drawings in her manual. She needed brake lines coming off the master cylinder (stainless steel, he’d recommended), new shocks and springs, a spring compressor, bushings for the trailing arm ends, rear spring mounts. She surprised herself with how much she knew, just from reading and crawling around under the car. Maybe it had soaked in, the way she’d wanted it to. Down the street, some of the neighbors were out in their yards, raking grass clippings, washing window screens. The last thing she needed was for some old neighborhood acquaintance to recognize her and start asking
a hundred questions. She turned back, walked around the house and toward the tent.
Inside, things were just as Marty and Lem had left them two years before—a six-pack of empties, potato chip bags, a damp sleeping bag spread across the floor—everything coated in a dusting of yellow pollen. Alison sat and unlaced her sneakers, then tied open the front flaps to let in the light. In the corner sat a battered spiral notebook, the pages swollen with moisture. She turned through the mostly blank pages, some of them filled with lists of building materials or tools, one with a checklist for a camping trip he’d taken. Near the middle, Marty had written “NEW YEARS 1996,” and underneath he’d included a list of resolutions:
1. More situps (flabby)
2. Get a real job
3. Fishing with Lem
4. Make A. happy
5. No more shit.
She felt the words with her fingertips, reading over them again. Make A. happy. You poor thing, Marty, she thought. All his plans so abstract, so…ungrounded. No more shit. His whole problem had been that he never understood the happiness or the shit, where they came from, how they played out in the marriage. Near the back of the book she found rough drawings and notes in Marty’s handwriting, some of the drawings crossed out and redone in what she guessed was Lem’s hand. The drawings were odd—boxes, circles, arrows. Finally, she figured it out: These were plans for some kind of perpetual-motion machine. Magnets spun on a turntable, a series of interlocking wheels. She looked them over, shaking her head.
She thought about them, these two grown-up little boys excited over the impossible, dreaming of the unattainable, and the thought of it made her cry. The boyishness that at first had so attracted her and later made her push him away now just seemed sad-a missed chance, a lost opportunity. She cried now for the same reason she had in class once, when she was lecturing on the meeting between the leader of the peasant revolt and fourteen-year-old King Richard. She’d taught this the same year as the Gulf War, when even some of her youngest students were snatched up by their reserve commitments and scuttled off to the desert, and suddenly the weight of all that and the thought of this boy-king, like some king in a fairy tale, made her break down in front of her class, her voice quavering. (Later, Ernie had told her, “You can’t laugh or cry in front of students, it just confuses them too much.”)
But that is what she felt now, for her husband. That somehow he’d gotten stuck in seeing the world as a boy would, and she had pushed him away for not growing up. He had even died because he’d been playing. Playing with Lem, using the new toys in the backyard. She’d hated it then and maybe she would hate it now, but in his absence, she at least understood it. The past rose up to debate the present for meaning, but both of them lied and meaning was lost. The future leaned in the corner, knowing everything but unable to speak.
She still carried with her the vinyl telephone book she’d used to look up Sarah’s number, and she thumbed through the pages, the numbers for businesses Marty had worked for or with, always cobbling together his living as if it were another of his projects built from scraps in the basement. Just before the accident, he and Lem had a weekend kiosk at the mall, making wooden plaques carved with peoples’ names or the names of their boats or beach houses or dogs, making barely enough to pay rent on the kiosk. They did odd jobs they found with flyers stapled to telephone poles and tacked up on the bulletin board at Food Lion. In the fall, they would sweep out chimneys, using a brush set they’d bought at Sears. Marty always had big plans: getting insured and bonded, placing an ad in the Yellow Pages, hiring a work crew, starting his own contracting business—get a real job … no more shit. None of it ever happened, and she used to tell him he was throwing away his life, squandering his skills on make-work. Sometimes it hit her that his whole existence had been a patchwork of unfinished things, but then she felt mean for thinking this and tamped it out of her mind. It wasn’t his fault the years were snatched away from him. Lem now worked for someone else’s contracting business, even though, he said, he would not climb a ladder any higher than his own head or use a radial arm saw, afraid of some accident, some terrible little slip.
Alison pushed the buttons on her cell phone, and Sarah answered on the third ring. In the background were the sounds of big-band music and the murmur of half a dozen voices. Of course, the dance lessons.
“Hey, I have a couple messages for you,” Sarah said after hearing about the progress with the house. “Max called and wanted me—oh crap, hold on a sec, okay?” Sarah muffled the phone, and Alison heard her telling Mr. Kesler that they were waiting for music, and in the background was Mr. Rossi’s voice and the sound of water pouring into paper cups, and those sounds felt as though they contained all the other sounds of Wiley Ford, the men talking in low voices as they fished the lake, or the creak of her garage door, or the buzzy lights of the Discount Rage Center, or the hiss of the coffee machines at the Red Bird, or the jangly bells behind Mr. Beachy’s front door at AAAA Auto.
“Anyway,” Sarah was saying, “Max got held up by something. He’s on his way.”
Alison nodded. “Good. I need to get out of here.” She’d noticed that she’d left a light on in the basement.
“But you’re going back, right? To finish?”
She stiffened. “I’m not sure.”
“You’re not sure? Alison, that’s your house we’re talking about.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m looking right at it.”
“You can’t just dump the whole thing and—”
“Just shut up, Sarah.”
“Don’t you say that to me. God…”
That was part of the problem: all the things she hadn’t ever said to Sarah. How her marriage had never been bad, not abusive or angry, but just a quiet disappointment, all that passion and hope shrinking down to a small hole through which they would speak in the daytime and touch briefly at night, through which their years and days would pass. What could she have said about a marriage where nothing was really wrong, aside from the way it slowly drained feeling from her? How could she explain her mourning, which stayed with her not because of its depth but because of its shallowness? Because she never felt like she’d been engulfed by it, never covered by it, never porous with loss? She’d loved Marty and missed him now, but she had also lied, and the love and the missing were never what she’d made them out to be, never filled up the shape she’d made for them, never matched the long shadow of guilt they created. And the house now, fixed or not, was only some leftover thing, the unfilled shape of her missing life. She thought of their work throughout the afternoon, how Lem and Pammy had wanted everything back exactly the way it was, how they’d tossed Marty’s boots into the entrance hall, where Alison had always tripped over them, and put his dismantled fishing reel back on the folding tray, as he’d left it. A museum was what they wanted, a diorama of some earlier, happier life, all painted and shoe-boxed. But it just didn’t work that way; teenagers broke into your diorama and trashed it, a dammed-up stream flooded it, neglect let it rust. Time, as a thousand clichés had it, marched on, a stoic soldier, armed and deadly. But she preferred to imagine time as some grimy little kid just scuffing down the road, kicking a tin can along the gutter, ignorant of all those people in the houses that lined the street. Two years unfurled and dragged behind her, tethered to this empty house. In those two years, Lem had turned forty, Ernie’s daughter had left for college, the Orioles had built a new stadium, one of Sarah’s ex-students had died, a war had been fought in Eastern Europe, a president had been involved in a scandal, her Corvette had decayed into ruin, and Bill had discovered the need to procreate. It never ended. The tin can kept rattling.
She made quick half apologies and see-you-laters with Sarah then put away her phone and left the tent, standing in the yard with the cool of night on her bare arms. When she peeked in through the glass square of the basement door, of course all she saw was the dusty bench, the harsh light, the scattered tools.
Soon she heard the truck turn into the driv
e, saw the lights in the tops of the pine trees. She ran as hard as she could, popped open the door, settled herself into the soft green light from the dash, the aria floating up out of the speakers. Max turned to her, shaking his head.
“I am so sorry. I tried to get a message—”
“Let’s go,” she told him, her breath shallow. “Get me out of here.”
“Whoa, what happened?”
She looked at him, studied his face. “My husband died,” she said.
Some sort of suitable work area is essential. It is understood, and appreciated, that many home mechanics do not have a good workshop or garage available, and end up doing major repairs outside. It is recommended, however, that the overhaul be completed under the cover of a roof.
6
* * *
Back in town, all of Wiley Ford was festooned with flags and pennants and plastic banners hung across the bars, everyone ready for the start of the upcoming Founders’ Day Celebration, and the parade, the culmination of the week’s activities. The town had the parade every year, along with ones for Halloween and Arbor Day, but none for Christmas or Columbus Day or the Fourth of July, all the ones Alison was used to growing up. It was like some discount store had run a special on irregular holiday parades, and Wiley Ford had snapped them all up.