Taft

by Ann Patchett

  "You need to get home," I said, though there was no telling if she could hear me for the noise of the rain. I pulled her away from the car and up the street towards the house where she lived.

  It was dark in every direction. The only light came blurred out of windows from houses that were set back far from the street. No cars passed us. The rain kept everybody tight indoors. There was so much rain it was hard to get a good breath. It didn't seem like I was pulling Fay anymore. She had started pulling me, and I was walking behind her up the driveway. My shoes were heavy with water and they squished and pulled against my feet.

  "Go on in," I said.

  "You're here," Fay said, holding onto my hand tighter in case I decided to make a run for it. "You've got to see something."

  We went off the driveway and into the mud. Mud was the least of our problems. I stayed with her. I thought of the night I was inside that house and thought that this wasn't so different. Inside or just a little outside was all the same. It made me nervous. Men didn't walk girls between houses in the rain in the dark. We came around to the side. We were walking through bushes and the loose branches of some trees. We were practically at the window when she stopped me. It was like watching a movie, the screen divided up by windowpanes. It was so bright inside that they never could have seen us, even if they had been looking. The water on the glass was steady enough that it was almost clear. I remembered a sugar Easter egg my grandmother brought me when I was a child and when you looked inside you saw the world was full of rabbits and chickens made out of a hard, bright frosting. They were in the dining room. I saw Carl. He looked sullen, standing near the table in his T-shirt and jeans, his toothpick arms crossed in front of his chest. There were two women, one was blond with her hair piled up on top of her head, the other had hair that was short and no color in particular. A man walked into the room and the blond woman started to make over him. You could see their mouths move but the rain kept them quiet.

  "You know Carl," Fay said, pointing. "The woman next to him, that's Virginia, that's my mother. The one with the lipstick is Lily, she's my mother's sister, and the man is my uncle, Calvin. They're all wondering where the hell I am right about now. They're ready to start dinner. They don't like it when things run late. Hey," she whispered. "Idiots. Right here." She started to wave, but I took her hand and held it down.

  It was like I was hungry to look at them, because I couldn't make myself stop. The wallpaper was striped blue and white and there was some sort of pattern I couldn't make out in the blue. There was a brass chandelier with the lights shaped to look like candles in glass globes. The aunt was putting silverware on the table and the light caught on her rings like she was a mirrored ball in a dance hall. The uncle was talking to Carl, who wasn't listening. I could tell that from the bushes, but the uncle didn't seem to know. Virginia just sat quietly at the table, less in the room than me or Fay. She hadn't dressed up like her sister. She had forgotten it was a birthday party.

  "I don't look a thing like my mother, do I?" Fay said, her mouth close up to my ear. "Carl and me look like Daddy. Carl looks so much like him it's spooky. First thing everybody used to say when they met him, Do you know how much you look like your father?"

  I broke myself away from the movie and turned to Fay. She looked like Taft. She was so wet it was like she was underwater. She started kissing me. Little kisses, ten, twenty, thirty, on my lips. I knelt down beside the house, in the deep mud of what would be a flower bed a few weeks from now. The little green tips of the jonquils were up already and I crushed them with my knees. I felt too sick to stand. I didn't even have to think about what it would be like to make love to her there. I could see it like it was happening in front of me. "Go inside," I said.

  "No."

  "They're waiting on you."

  She put her hands inside the collar of my shirt. It was so wet she had to work them down, as if she was separating skin from skin. My face pressed into the front of her shirt and I felt the shape of her breast with my cheek. It was all the water that was drowning me. She kissed me.

  "Fay," I said. I was trying to pull up through the water. I took her shoulders in my hands. I was six inches from the brick of her house. "Tell me how old you are. Tell me the truth."

  "Eighteen," she said. "Eighteen next week."

  I knew it was something like that. I'd always known, but I asked because hearing it would stop me. Seventeen meant high school, never coming to work before three in the afternoon, reading from textbooks on breaks. I stood up. My legs were stiff and clumsy as we walked away from the house. I rubbed her bare knees until the mud came off in my hands. Other than that, there was no way to fix her up. "I'm going now," I said, and this time it was true. The people in the dining room were eating little snacks on crackers, trying not to spoil their supper while they waited.

  "You can't," she said. Was she crying? There was no way in the world to know.

  "You go on and get yourself something to eat." I took a step away from her and she stuck herself to me. She was so light, lighter than Carl even.

  "I'm lonely," she said in my ear. She said it like she might have said I'm tired or I'm hungry. It made me crazy. It made me want to promise her things, to cover her up. It took a lot to get her off, but when I finally did she just stood there, watching me. Even when I was at the end of the driveway she was still standing there.

  I walked back to my car in the rain.

  I knew the way to her house and back from her house in my sleep. Any street in town could get you there or take you farther away. It wasn't like driving. I was just going along. What I was doing I could do nothing about. There was a Jim Dandy just before the Fowler Expressway. From a distance I could see they had one of those pay phones you could drive up to. I knew Marion's number by heart.

  "Hey Mrs. Woodmoore," I said. "It's John."

  "What a treat to talk to you two days in a row," she said.

  "Well, I wanted to thank you for supper." The rain was beating on the piece of metal that hung over the phone, making such a racket I could barely hear her.

  "Are you outside?"

  "It's just noisy in here," I said. "I'm calling from work."

  "I don't know how you stand it."

  "It's not so bad, really." The rain was blowing in through the open car window, making a lake in the front seat. What the hell difference did it make? "Hey Mrs. Woodmoore, I was calling to see if Ruth wanted to come down. There's a band playing tonight, some old friends of hers. I thought she might like to get out."

  "You've always been thoughtful of Ruth," she said. "I think it's hard on her being home. Would you like to ask her yourself? She's right here."

  "That would be good."

  Fay had left her purse in the car. I picked it up and kneaded the leather in my free hand.

  "Hello?" It was Ruth.

  "I'm about ten minutes from home right now. I'm calling from a pay phone. If we both leave now we can get to my apartment at the same time."

  There was a pause, but I never thought she wouldn't do it. "All right."

  "You have to leave right now," I said. "Do you understand me? Don't put on lipstick, don't brush your hair." I pulled the purse into my lap. "Just put down the phone, get your car keys, and walk out the door. I've already told your mother where you're going."

  "That sounds like fun," she said. Mrs. Woodmoore would be standing there, smiling, as close as I was to the windshield. "I'll see you then." She hung up the phone.

  When I was driving I tried not to think about anything. I didn't think about the people inside the window or Taft or Ruth. I kept my eyes on the road. It took a lot of concentration, driving in weather like that. I didn't even want to think about Fay. At first I saw her pulling her wet sweater over her head but then I stopped it. I didn't want things to go further yet. I didn't want anything to change. That moment, the car and the night and the rain, the way I could almost feel her, I wanted to hold everything exactly like that for as long as I could. Cars drove by sprayin
g walls of water into each other. All of the sudden you were blind. Two times the wheels lost contact with the road and for a split second I felt myself slipping, but I got it back. I tried going slower.

  I pulled into the parking lot behind my apartment building and made a run for it. Marion was standing inside the alcove in front of the door. She was leaning against the wall like she'd been there all night, like she had nothing but time.

  "I thought you said come right away." Ruth. I could tell the difference in their voices. It was Ruth.

  She didn't have a drop of water on her, just like she didn't before, but she wouldn't have thought there was anything wrong with me being soaked. Just look at the night. No one would blame me for looking the way I did. I didn't say anything. I closed my eyes and put my hand behind her neck and brought her to me. There wasn't a lot of time. Not while everything was still clear in my mind. I kissed her there at the door. I kissed her neck and her ears. I kissed her hard on the mouth and she kissed me back, pulling her dry arms around me. Once I could feel the pressure of her against my chest I could think again. Then I could smell her and see the people in the sugar egg. I could pull her down to me the way I wanted. I reached under her coat and lifted up her shirt, ran my hands across her back and down to the sides of her hips. I touched the slick material of her underpants with my fingers. She kept kissing me. She was pulling on my belt. My clothes were so wet she had to struggle with them. I felt her tongue against the side of my face. It was the same rain making the same noise. The noise kept everything else quiet. Her raincoat slipped off of her and suddenly she was everywhere. I could feel her in back of me and in front of me at the same time. She was against the door and still I felt the door on my back. I wanted her. I told myself so over and over again in my mind. This is how I made love to all of them, equally.

  Taft doesn't like going to Memphis. He doesn't like his wife's sister or her husband. He doesn't like the thought of their family being anything more than the four of them. Lily is always talking about family, family this and that. "We should do more things together as a family," she says, and Taft wonders what the hell she's talking about. He doesn't see any way that their two families link up. Lily has her eye on his kids. That's what it's all about. Never had any of her own and now she wants to get a hold of his. She's always asking Fay and Carl to come up for holidays or spend the summer with them. Virginia told him her sister couldn't have children. Or maybe it was Calvin. There was something wrong with one of them and it showed. Whenever Taft walks through their house he thinks, You can't have carpet this pale and expect to raise a family on it. Of course, it wouldn't be bad having that kind of money. He doesn't like looking at Lily's jewelry all the time. He thinks she could wear a little less when they're around, or give a piece of it to her sister. One sister raises two children on next to nothing, keeps a job and a clean house and is lucky to get a nice sweater for Christmas. The other one goes out to lunch at the country club while somebody else gets bused in to do her vacuuming and she gets something called a tennis bracelet for Christmas which she never takes off. She doesn't play tennis, either.

  When Virginia and Taft were first going out Lily used to drive to Knoxville to study in the medical library because she'd read in a magazine that that was the best way to catch yourself a doctor. She didn't know the pharmacology students studied there too. But this one had a family business, four generations of Martin-Quick pharmacists. And he was from Memphis, which was far enough away from Coalfield to forget about it altogether. There went Lily. It wasn't until Fay and Carl were born and there were no babies for Lily and Calvin that they even started hearing from them regularly.

  Taft and Virginia and Fay and Carl are all going to Memphis. Carl is going to wrestle in the state championship. Virginia says it's killing two birds with one stone. Taft usually manages to get out of the trips to see her sister, but he would go anywhere his son was wrestling, even to Memphis.

  Taft doesn't like going to Memphis. He doesn't like the look of the place. It's too flat. The river is dirty. He's been sitting in the shadow of the Smoky Mountains since the day he was horn. The mountains, he thinks, are beautiful. He doesn't like the weather, which never seems to cool off. Every breeze is choked with humidity. It's like trying to walk through water. The people are too rough, too forward, everybody knowing how much money everyone else has and where the money came from. In Memphis, money is worth more if you didn't have to earn it. The old money lives in special neighborhoods. They have picnics and parties together where they feel especially clever because they don't have to work, although a few of them do, just to pass time.

  It's a long drive. It is Tennessee end to end, mountains to delta, with the dip of Nashville and the valley in the middle to break things up. Fay can read in the car without making herself sick. Carl is staring out the window, concentrating. He's been training like crazy, running up and down the school bleachers holding bricks over his head. His weight is exactly right. He measures out the water he drinks and wraps himself in Hefty bags and sweats in the sun. He knows there are two boys ranked higher than him, and another half a dozen beneath him who could take his spot. Taft looks at him in the rearview mirror while he drives. He worries for his worrying.

  As for himself, Taft has stopped worrying. The pain in his chest did not come back. By the time he woke up from his nap on the day he and Carl were working on the deck he was already beginning to forget about it. A cramp, a spasm, indigestion, exhaustion, strain, none of those things were important. Doctors are for sick people and Taft isn't sick. Once they start looking it opens up a whole can of worms. They find things wrong, one thing and then another until you're dead. That's the way it went with his father. He went in to see about a simple cough and came back with cancer. The more those doctors looked, the more they found. They said his father was shot through with it. They said they needed to explore. The exploring took them deeper down the mine shaft, into veins stuffed with cancer. They said he wouldn't live six months, and so he didn't. Taft believes people are like wells, clear water with some sediment on the bottom. As long as you don't disturb them, they're going to be fine.

  This is the way he likes it, his family in the car, everybody together.

  Taft gets off the interstate and drives through downtown. His wife has forgotten to buy a gift for her sister. She wants to bring her something, a box of candy or a shaker of bath powder. Never go to someone's house empty handed, she says.

  "I'll wait in the car," Taft says.

  Carl and Fay want to go with their mother. They're restless from sitting for so long. They like the shops in Memphis. There is nothing like them in Coalfield.

  "We won't be twenty minutes," his wife says.

  Taft turns off the engine and rolls down the window and sits and waits. He's watching the people. And while he is sitting and waiting and watching, Taft thinks about the reason he doesn't like Memphis: too many blacks. In Coalfield this has never been a problem for him. There are plenty of blacks at the carpet factory and he likes them fine. He doesn't make jokes behind their backs. He doesn't think they shouldn't get the same breaks at work as everybody else. Plenty of people at the factory are this way and Taft isn't one of them. When Tommy Lawson lost two fingers in the cutting blade Taft chipped in more than any white guy on the line. Whenever there's an accident like that the guys put some money in the card. Taft likes Tommy. They ate together in the lunchroom sometimes. Tommy knows a lot about basketball and once they'd even talked about driving down to Knoxville together to see a Vols game, but they never did. Sitting in the car, Taft knows he doesn't have any problem with blacks. Tommy Lawson is proof of that.

  But in Memphis, it's different. In Memphis, downtown in the middle of the day, he feels funny being a white man, there are so few of them around. When he decides to count every black person who walks by his car, he can't. He has to count the white ones instead. Things aren't the way they're supposed to be. That's the problem with Memphis.

  "I got some pretty little h
and soaps," Virginia says as she gets into the front seat and Carl and Fay slide into the back. "Look at these. They look like shells." He wishes he could ask them if they've noticed, but he never would.

  Lily makes a crown rib roast for dinner and then takes offense that Carl will only eat salad without dressing. "I made it for you," she says. "For luck tomorrow."

  "It's his weight," Taft tells her. "If he doesn't make weight tomorrow he can't wrestle."

  "Well, everybody eats dinner," Lily says.

  They move their food around on their plates. There's something about the room. The sound of the knives and forks tapping against each other seems magnified a thousand times. Taft can hear people chew. The room is too fancy to really enjoy the meal. If he could choose, he would take their breakfast nook any day. The table is only big enough for four, and anything you want you can reach, or somebody can pass it to you without it being any bother. They use placemats instead of a tablecloth. They use paper napkins. Who in their right mind would want to fool with cloth napkins?

  Taft can't think of anything to talk about. Will he say to his brother-in-law, How's the drug business? He finds himself staring out the window that is half covered up by bushes and low tree branches. If it was him, he'd cut all that back so a person could see out.