Necessary Skills
This story came out of a writing exercise in Michelle Herman’s class. As I remember (foggy memory many years later), Michelle had us do character sketches of a minor character from a story we were working on. Then she had us swap with somebody else in the class and the exercise was to write a scene between the two characters, merging two story worlds. I’d written about Barbara, the Bank Slut (the first drafts of this story were called “The Bank Slut’s Story”), and my partner, whose name I have shamefully forgotten, had written about Randy, who drove a Peachstate Cable truck down south. That meant I had to get Ohio Barbara down south somehow since it didn’t seem right to drag Randy up north, and while I was trying to figure out how Barbara had gotten herself to Georgia, a much better understanding of a character I hadn’t liked much emerged. I don’t think you have to like all your characters, but I do think you have to have some sympathy for them and a lot of understanding of why they do the things they do. And this story, which is so interior that it runs close to reverting to character sketch again, told me everything I needed to connect to Barbara.
Barbara knew she’d made a mistake when Matthew couldn’t change the tire.
She stood on the edge of the hot Georgia highway and watched Matthew fumble with the jack, flipping metal parts back and forth, clearly having no idea of how the thing worked. The tension made her lips thin and her neck tight. He’d deceived her. This was not her fault, she’d been careful this time. They’d been together for five months, and he’d done everything beautifully up till now. Even on the trip from Ohio to Florida, she’d admired the way he’d driven with such careless skill, one wrist draped over the wheel, the elbow of his other arm propped on the window edge. He’d looked as if he owned the road, and now he couldn’t work his own jack. Barbara sat down on the rear bumper of the Pontiac and thought about the duplicity of people and the slipperiness of life.
Living in Tibbett had been hard enough even before Matthew’s wife Lois had started calling her the Bank Slut. Tibbett wasn’t the kind of place that let mistakes go unnoticed, something Barbara had known early from hearing her mother and father talk about everyone in town. “Cheat,” her father would say. “Whore,” her mother would add. “Liar.” “Fool.” “Bum.” Barbara knew that everybody in Tibbett judged everybody else because her mother told her so. “People watch,” she’d told Barbara. “They watch and they talk behind their curtains. You be careful how you act.” Barbara had felt sorry for them, scared for all the people who were out there—the troublemakers, the sluts, the drunks—although she’d always felt safe herself, tucked behind her father’s good name.
Then her father had gone bankrupt when she was a senior in high school, and she’d been left out in the open. “I just got some bad breaks,” her father had told her then. “Made a few mistakes. Don’t worry, people forget.” But Barbara had known those were just excuses. People didn’t forget. Her father had told her that her life would be all right because she was a Niedemeyer, and then he screwed up and it wasn’t, and she hadn’t been safe since.
Matthew exhaled loudly and said, “You could help some here,” and Barbara ignored him. How could she help? He was just like her father, turning to her mother and saying, “You’ll have to go to work now.” She could remember her mother’s face, the shock and the shame and the anger. Her mother hadn’t known how to work. Barbara did, she’d made sure of that, she was never going to depend on a man for money, she was never going to look like her mother had that day. But money didn’t protect you from life, you needed a man for that, somebody who had a good name and basic skills. Somebody not like her father. And now, not like Matthew.
Matthew swore and Barbara seethed. It wasn’t as if she’d asked him to split an atom, for heaven’s sake. He should have known how to work his own jack; this was his fault.
It was all their faults really. They’d come to the house to fix her roof (that was Gil) or her electricity (Louis) or her plumbing (Matthew), and she’d been truly grateful that they knew so much. It wasn’t that Barbara wasn’t competent; she was head teller at the First National Bank at only twenty-eight after all, and that hadn’t been easy, walking in there straight out of high school, saying she was Barbara Niedemeyer, watching people act like they didn’t know the name, like they thought she was just anybody’s daughter. No, it was that life held so many pitfalls for a woman, so many uncertainties, and these were men who were certain. “I can patch that right up for you,” Gil had said. “But the next time you have that roof done, you tell them to tear it off, not roof over it.” “You need a bigger box,” Louis had said. “Running this kind of load off that old box, you’ll have trouble in no time.” And Matthew had been the same—“Copper pipe, definitely,” he’d said. “Wouldn’t want somebody as pretty as you to get lead poisoning”—they’d all been the same, all happily married, solid family men with good reputations, the kind of men that Barbara wanted to depend on someday, the kind that would never leave her stranded. She admired them for that and told them so and then it turned out that they weren’t that happy after all, that their wives had changed after they’d gotten married, that they were lonely, wistful, unappreciated.
Barbara had appreciated them. She couldn’t help it. She’d been so grateful they were protecting her from roof leaks and power failures, and they’d been so grateful she’d noticed that they were good at things, and then they’d moved in and one day she noticed that they didn’t know that much after all, that they made mistakes on ordinary things, and that scared her, and she had to let them go. Look at what had happened to her mother; one mistake in marriage and she still couldn’t hold her head up in public, still spent all her time hiding in the house, taking care of the man who’d let her down.
Matthew was standing now, staring at the jack as if he were trying to learn it by looking at it. He’d been so competent back in Ohio, telling her not to worry about a thing, he’d take care of it all. He’d looked so solid there in his blue work shirt with Ferguson Plumbing embroidered right on the shirt, not on a patch. Barbara had relaxed a little just because there wasn’t a patch, because his name was a permanent part of the shirt, not just ironed on, not something that might peel off with wear.
First he put in her new copper pipes and her leaks stopped, and she was grateful. Then he came back and put in her new shower head and her shower pressure went up, and she told him he was wonderful. But then he came back again and didn’t charge her for putting a new stopper in the bathtub, and he fixed the plug on her lamp and cleared out her clogged gutter and told her that her dogwood needed potassium to bloom. And Barbara surrendered, helpless under the full force of his competence.
Matthew caught his finger in the jack handle and swore again, and Barbara remembered everything she’d risked for him, remembered the day she’d gone by Lois’s beauty parlor and seen Lois come to the door with a customer, heard her say “Bank Slut” loudly, sounding the way Barbara’s mother used to, her voice fat with contempt. Barbara felt annoyed now with Lois. Lois should have been relieved when Barbara had taken Matthew off her hands. “Let the Bank Slut have him,” Lois should have said. “He’s worthless at changing tires.” Really, Barbara couldn’t see why Lois was upset at all. All she’d lost was Matthew.
A Peachstate Cable truck came toward them and pulled off the road. The man who got out—medium height, nothing special, nothing awful, just a man—said, “Need some help?” like he didn’t care, and Matthew did one of those macho things where he said, “No, just this damn jack,” which really meant “God, yes, but I’m going to hate your guts if you can do this when I can’t.”
Of course, the cable man could. Barbara moved to the edge of the road and watched as he flipped the pieces of the jack together and pumped the back of the car off the ground as if it were nothing. He had good shoulders, steady hands, thick dark hair. She grew calmer just watching him, and when he looked up and met her eyes—he had nice dark eyes—she smiled, grateful to be relieved.
Matthew said, “Get off the damn road, Barbara. You’re going to get hit by a car.”
The cable man stood up and nodded to Barbara. His overalls had “Randy” embroidered on a patch over the breast pocket. Randy was a good name. It sounded skilled. Randys worked with their hands. How had she ever found a plumber named Matthew?
Randy said, “Got a spare?”
Matthew fussed with the trunk. “I’m a plumber,” he told Randy, with a fake laugh. “Never use jacks.”
Well, why not? He drove cars. He should know jacks. Excuses.
Randy pulled out the spare. “It’s flat,” he said, and Barbara knew it was over. Matthew was not taking care of her. He wasn’t even taking care of himself. If she wasn’t careful, she’d end up taking care of both of them.
“Never use it,” Matthew said, and laughed again, his eyes twitching from the cable man to Barbara and back.
“Sell you the one in the truck,” Randy said and went and got the tire and put it on while Matthew worried aloud that it wouldn’t fit, that it would be bad for the car, that it would come off if it wasn’t made for Volkswagons.
Barbara tuned him out, like elevator music, and began to wonder if Randy would give her a lift to the next town. They must have a bus stop there. She could go home to Tibbett, lay low for a while, try again. Find somebody who wasn’t married this time, although most of the men who weren’t married, weren’t married for a reason.
Randy pulled the old wheel off and threw it in Matthew’s trunk, every move he made absolutely sure.
Maybe she could stay in the next town for a while, if that’s where Randy was from. Maybe there was a First National Bank there that needed a teller. Maybe she and Randy would start to talk in the cable van while he was taking her to the bus station. Maybe he was lonely, maybe his wife had died, but not because he hadn’t taken care of her, maybe she’d inherited some disease from her mother, and maybe she’d find out that he could do plumbing and electricity, too, that everyone knew him, that when their cable went out, they called and said, “Send Randy, he always knows how to fix it right.”
“It’s old,” Randy said to Matthew when the tire was on. “Don’t trust it too far.”
Matthew pulled his wallet out. Plumbers made good money, and Matthew liked pulling his wallet out. Barbara had liked it, too, had liked the confidence with which Matthew had handled his cash, but now it was obvious that money was meaningless without basic skills. “How much?” Matthew asked.
Randy shrugged. “Twelve bucks maybe. It was old.”
Matthew thrust a fifty at him. “Smallest thing I got. You got change?”
Matthew had smaller bills than a fifty; he’d gotten change at the last restaurant to tip the waitress. He’d only tipped fifteen percent, too, not the twenty per cent Barbara liked to see. Waitresses had hard lives, but Matthew had only given a fifteen per cent tip. Really, she’d been blind.
Randy had stepped back a little when Matthew shoved the fifty at him. He squinted into the sun as if he were figuring something out, and then he got out his wallet, much thinner than Matthew’s, and sorted through the bills slowly, counting out three ones, then a five, then two tens, then two more fives, his lips moving as he smoothed the bills on the truck of the Plymouth to count them again.
He was having a hard time, Barbara realized. He wasn’t good at math.
Maybe he was dyslexic. She felt so bad for him. How awful to be a man and not be good at math.
She looked down the road to the next exit. Maybe it was a pretty town, but maybe it was just dust and gray boards and no breeze. Maybe there was a bank, but probably not a First National, and she probably couldn’t be head teller there, not at twenty-eight. That was the thing, really. It was all very well and good to daydream about new places, but the fact was, she’d worked hard to get where she was in Tibbett.
“You going to just stand there?” Matthew asked her when the bills had changed hands.
Barbara took a last look at Randy. He looked nice, but he was bad at math.
“No,” she said, and got in the car, hoping the tire would get them all the way back to Ohio.
Yes, the amount of info-dump (characters thinking about their pasts) is not good here. I think Barbara really would be thinking a lot of these things as the events in the now of the story unfolded, but not the big chunks that mainly explain things. But even so, I like this piece. I think it’s because I didn’t understand Barbara until I wrote it, and then she became one of my favorite characters.
Just Wanted You To Know
This story was written because someone in my MFA class wrote an epistolary story (a story told in letters) and I thought, “I want to try that” because it was such a great exercise in voice. I knew Debbie, Darla’s sister, was heading for a collision with Barbara, the Bank Slut, so I wrote the letter she’d write to her dumb-ass husband, Ronnie, after he left her for Barbara, complete with postscripts as two weeks pass and she works through what’s happened and where she’s headed.
Dear Ronnie,
I couldn’t help but notice you didn’t come home last weekend.
I am trying to be calm and understanding here, but Darla told me yesterday after church that the reason you didn’t come home Saturday night—and I was so worried, Ronnie, I even drove out to the bowling alley to see if you were out there maybe having a heart attack in the parking lot, and then I sat up all night worrying myself to death, not knowing what had happened to you—was because you were staying with that Barbara Niedemeyer from the First National. She told me that, and all the breath just went right out from my body, and the whole world swung around. And then I remembered that all I needed to do was faint in Saint Mark’s vestibule and everybody in Tibbett would know, not to mention Mama, and Darla was holding my hand so tight that my wedding rings cut right into my skin, and the pain sort of brought me back. But Ronnie, it like to have broke my heart to hear news like that, especially from my own sister who had told me not to marry you the night before I did, but I stuck up for you then, and I’m trying to stick up for you now. But it’s hard, seeing as how you really did move in with Barbara, which I found out for sure when she called this morning from Toledo to say you’d be back in Tibbett in two weeks to pick up your things and the Mustang once the two of you got back from the vacation you’re taking on Mackinac Island. Twenty-six years of marriage, and you move in with a bank teller and go to Michigan with her and don’t even call to tell me yourself. I couldn’t hardly believe it, it hurt so much.
I just sat there with the phone in my hand and thought about how much we’ve always been together. And then Darla came by to pick me up for work and said, “I have been trying to call you for half an hour and getting a busy signal, why are you holding that phone?” so I hung up. And then I told Darla that Barbara had called, and she started to say something, and I told her what I’d been thinking, like about the first time I saw you in kindergarten, and you gave me the celery from your lunch. Do you remember that? And then I told her about the time in third grade, when you kissed me on the merry-go-round, and I fell off and had to have eight stitches in my head, and you know the scar’s still there. And I reminded her about how you took me to the Spring Dance in the ninth grade, and we danced to “God Only Knows,” and you groped my chest even though I didn’t have that much then, and Mr. Johnson caught you and made you go home early, and Mama had a fit and told me I was going straight to hell, and I had to see Mrs. Pinckney on Monday so she could tell me about saving it for marriage, but I knew then I was going to marry you, Ronnie, so it didn’t matter. And I reminded her about how you took such good care of me in high school, telling me we’d better wait, and how you married me right away when we didn’t and Ronnie Junior was on the way, and how you cried the night he was born and said you were the happiest man in Tibbett, Ohio, and that you’d love me till you died even though Ronnie Jr. being born meant you had to go to work at your daddy’s Bowl-A-Rama instead of taking business courses at the Lima branch like you’d planned. I told he
r how much you wanted to go to college, Ronnie, don’t think I don’t remember, but I told her, too, that you never threw it up to me, not once, and I loved you so much for that.
And she said, “Debbie, honey, that was all twenty years ago, what has that son of a bitch done for you lately?” and while I was thinking of an answer, Darrin Mueller called and said you’d asked him to look in on me and make sure I was all right while you were out of town for a couple of weeks, and I knew you still cared about me, Ronnie. I knew you had to love me still, and that’s what I told Darla, and she looked like she wanted to say something but she didn’t.
And then I had to go in to work because I had Leona Cooper’s perm to do at ten. And you don’t know how hard it was going in there, Ronnie, with all those other hairdressers, not knowing whether they knew or didn’t know, especially with my own sister at the station next to me doing a cellophane on Doris Weber, the biggest mouth in town. And then little old Leona, bless her heart, said the same thing she’s been saying to me for twenty years, “Kink it up good, Debbie Jo, you know I like it kinky,” and I thought about how hard you’d laughed when I’d told you that that was what she always said, and how you’d said that little old Leona wouldn’t know kinky if it bit her on the butt, and I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. And I got so rattled that I almost forgot her Roux rinse except she always says, “Now don’t you forget my Roux, Debbie, it’s Winter Wheat,” and she did this time, too, so I didn’t. But it was a hard, hard day, Ronnie. It truly was.
Then Darla came over to the house after work and was really nice again, which was even harder because you know Darla, it takes a lot to make her nice, so I knew she really felt bad for me. She said I could stay with her and Max, that Max said I was his sister, too, and that I could move right in anytime, and I thought that was really sweet, but I don’t want to, Ronnie. I want to be here with you where I’ve been for twenty-six years, and this is where you belong, too. I don’t think I even know who I am if I’m not married to you since I’ve been that for over half my life. Like Mama always says, women are meant to be married and, Ronnie, I was meant for you. And I don’t know what I’m going to say to Ronnie Jr. and Becky (you know she thinks you walk on water, Ronnie, and I truly do not know how you could do this to your only daughter, especially the first week she’s away at college again and not having her family with her, I truly don’t). And then there’s Mama. I just can’t hardly stand thinking about it.
Crazy People: The Crazy for You Stories Page 4