“That’s Evelyn again,” Pete said. “These were taken in Point Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost settlement in the U.S.”
Then there was a shot of the main street—little low buildings with slanted metal roofs, signs saying King Salmon Café, Cards, Liquor, Rooms. One slide showed a Colonel Sanders fried-chicken parlor with a billboard outside showing Colonel Sanders in a parka and fur boots. We all laughed.
“That’s Evelyn again,” Betty said, as another slide flashed on the screen.
“These were made before Evelyn died,” Pete said. “We’d always talked about going to Alaska, too,” Pete said. “I’m glad we made that trip before she died.”
“Good timing,” Sarah said.
“Evelyn was a good friend to me,” Betty said. “It was a lot like losing my sister.”
We saw Evelyn boarding a plane back for Seattle, and we saw Pete, smiling and waving, emerging from that same plane after it had landed in Seattle.
“It’s heating up,” Pete said. “I’ll have to turn off the projector for a little while to let it cool off. What would you like to see then? Hawaii? Sarah, it’s your night; you say.”
Sarah looked at me.
“I guess we should think about going home, Pete,” I said. “It’s going to be a long day tomorrow.”
“Yes, we should go,” Sarah said. “We really should, I guess.” But she continued to sit there with her glass in her hand. She looked at Betty and then she looked at Pete. “It’s been a very wonderful evening for us,” she said. “I really have a hard time thanking you enough. This has meant a good deal to us.”
“No, it’s us who should be thanking you,” Pete said, “and that’s the truth. It’s been a pleasure knowing you. I hope that the next time you’re in this part of the country you’ll stop by here and say hello.”
“You won’t forget us?” Betty said. “You won’t, will you?” Sarah shook her head. Then we were on our feet and Pete was getting our coats. Betty said, “Oh, don’t forget your doggy bag. This will make you a nice snack tomorrow.”
Pete helped Sarah with her coat and then held my coat for me to slip my arm into.
We all shook hands on the front porch. “The wind’s coming up,” Pete said. “Don’t forget us, now,” Pete said. “And good luck.”
“We won’t,” I said. “Thank you again, thanks for everything.” We shook hands once more. Pete took Sarah by the shoulders and kissed her on the cheek. “You take good care of yourselves, now. This fellow too. Take good care of him,” he said. “You’re both good people. We like you.”
“Thank you, Pete,” Sarah said. “Thank you for saying that.”
“I’m saying it because it’s true, or else I wouldn’t be saying it,” Pete said.
Betty and Sarah embraced.
“Well, good night to you,” Betty said. “And God bless you both.”
We walked down the sidewalk past the flowers. I held the gate for Sarah and we walked across the gravel parking lot to our house. The restaurant was dark. It was after midnight. Wind blew through the trees. The parking lot lights burned, and the generator in back of the restaurant hummed and turned the freezer fan inside the locker.
I unlocked the door to the house. Sarah snapped on the light and went into the bathroom. I turned on the lamp beside the chair in front of the window and sat down with a cigarette. After a little while Sarah came out, still in her coat, and sat on the sofa and touched her forehead.
“It was a nice evening,” she said. “I won’t forget it. So different from so many of our other departures,” she said. “Imagine, to actually have dinner with your landlord before you move.” She shook her head. “We’ve come a long way, I guess, if you look at it that way. But there’s a long way to go yet. Well, this is the last night we’ll spend in this house, and I’m so tired from that big dinner I can hardly keep my eyes open. I think I’ll go in and go to bed.”
“I’m going too,” I said. “Just as soon as I finish this.”
We lay in bed without touching. Then Sarah turned on her side and said, “I’d like you to hold me until I get off to sleep. That’s all, just hold me. I miss Cindy tonight. I hope she’s all right. I pray she’s all right. God help her to find her way. And God help us,” she said.
After a while her breathing became slow and regular and I turned away from her again. I lay on my back and stared at the dark ceiling. I lay there and listened to the wind. Then, just as I started to close my eyes again, I heard something. Or, rather, something that I had been hearing I didn’t hear anymore. The wind still blew, and I could hear it under the eaves of the house and singing in the wires outside the house, but something was not there any longer, and I didn’t know what it was. I lay there a while longer and listened, and then I got up and went out to the living room and looked out the front window at the restaurant, the edge of moon showing through the fast-moving clouds.
I stood at the window and tried to figure out what was wrong. I kept looking at the glint of ocean and then back to the darkened restaurant. Then it came to me, what the odd silence was. The generator had gone off over at the restaurant. I stood there a while longer wondering what I should do, if I should call Pete. Maybe it would take care of itself in a little while and switch back on, but for some reason I knew this wouldn’t happen.
He must have noticed it too, for suddenly I saw a light go on over at Pete’s, and then a figure appeared on the steps with a flashlight. The figure carrying the flashlight went to the back of the restaurant and unlocked the door, and then lights began to go on in the restaurant. After a little while, after I had smoked a cigarette, I went back to bed. I went to sleep immediately.
The next morning we had instant coffee, and washed the cups and packed them when we were finished. We didn’t talk much. There was an appliance truck behind the restaurant, and I could see Betty and Leslie coming and going from the back door of the restaurant, carrying things in their arms. I didn’t see Pete.
We loaded the car. We would be able to carry everything into Eureka in one load, after all. I walked over to the restaurant to drop off the keys, but just as I got to the office door, it opened and Pete came out carrying a box.
“It’s going to rot,” he said. “The salmon thawed out. It was just starting to freeze, then it began to thaw. I’m going to lose all this salmon. I’m going to have to give it away, get rid of it this morning. The fillets and prawns and scallops, too. Everything. The generator burned out, goddamn it.”
“I’m sorry, Pete,” I said. “We have to go now. I wanted to give you back the keys.”
“What is it?” he said and looked at me.
“The house keys,” I said. “We’re leaving now. We’re on our way.”
“Give them to Leslie in there,” he said. “Leslie takes care of the rentals. Give her your keys.”
“I will, then. Good-bye, Pete. I’m sorry about this. But thanks again for everything.”
“Sure,” he said. “Sure, don’t mention it. Good luck to you. Take it easy.” He nodded and went on over to his house with his box of fillets. I gave the keys to Leslie, said good-bye to her, and walked back to the car where Sarah was waiting.
“What’s wrong?” Sarah said. “What’s happened? It looked like Pete didn’t have the time of day for you.”
“The generator burned out last night at the restaurant and the freezer shut down and some of their meat spoiled.”
“Is that it?” she said. “That’s too bad. I’m sorry to hear it. You gave them the keys, didn’t you? We’ve said good-bye. I guess we can go now.”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess we can.”
Dreams
My wife is in the habit of telling me her dreams when she wakes up. I take her some coffee and juice and sit in a chair beside the bed while she wakes up and moves her hair away from her face. She has the look that people waking up have, but she also has this look in her eyes of returning from somewhere.
“Well?” I say.
“It’s crazy,” she
says. “This was a dream and a half. I dreamed I was a boy going fishing with my sister and her girlfriend, but I was drunk. Imagine that. Doesn’t that beat everything? I was supposed to drive them fishing, but I couldn’t find the car keys. Then, when I found the keys, the car wouldn’t start. Suddenly, we were at the fishing place and on the lake in a boat. A storm was coming up, but I couldn’t get the motor started. My sister and her friend just laughed and laughed. But I was afraid. Then I woke up. Isn’t that strange? What do you make of it?”
“Write it down,” I said and shrugged. I didn’t have anything to say. I didn’t dream. I hadn’t dreamed in years. Or maybe I did but couldn’t remember anything when I woke up. One thing I’m not is an expert on dreams—my own or anybody else’s. Once Dotty told me she’d had a dream right before we got married when she thought she was barking! She woke herself up and saw her little dog, Bingo, sitting beside the bed looking at her in what she thought was a strange way. She realized she’d been barking in her sleep. What did it mean? she wondered. “That was a bad dream,” she said. She’d added the dream to her dream book, but that was that. She didn’t get back to it. She didn’t interpret her dreams. She just wrote them down and then, when she had the next one, she wrote that one down too.
I said, “I’d better go upstairs. I need to use the bathroom.”
“I’ll be along pretty soon. I have to wake up first. I want to think about this dream some more.”
I left her sitting up in bed, holding her cup, but not drinking from it. She was sitting there thinking about her dream.
I didn’t have to go to the bathroom after all, so I took some coffee and sat at the kitchen table. It was August, a heat wave, and the windows were open. Hot, yes, it was hot. The heat was killing. My wife and I slept in the basement for most of the month. But it was okay. We carried the mattress down there, pillows, sheets, everything. We had an end table, a lamp, an ashtray. We laughed. It was like starting over. But all the windows upstairs were open, and the windows next door, they were open too. I sat at the table listening to Mary Rice next door. It was early, but she was up and in her kitchen in her nightgown. She was humming, and she kept it up while I listened and drank coffee. Then her children came into their kitchen. This is what she said to them:
“Good morning, children. Good morning, my loved ones.”
It’s true. That’s what their mother said to them. Then they were at the table, laughing about something, and one of the kids was banging his chair up and down, laughing.
“Michael, that’s enough,” Mary Rice said. “Finish your cereal, honey.”
In a minute, Mary Rice sent her kids out of the room to get themselves dressed for school. She began to hum as she cleaned a dish. I listened and, listening, I thought, I am a rich man. I have a wife who dreams something every night, who lies there beside me until she falls asleep and then she goes far away into some rich dream every night. Sometimes she dreams of horses and weather and people, and sometimes she even changes her sex in her dreams. I didn’t miss dreaming. I had her dreams to think about if I wanted to have a dream life. And I have a woman next door who sings or else hums all day long. All in all, I felt quite lucky.
I moved to the front window to watch the kids next door when they went out of their house to go to school. I saw Mary Rice kiss each of the children on the face, and I heard her say, “Good-bye, children.” Then she latched the screen, stood for a minute watching her children walk down the street, then turned and went back inside.
I knew her habits. She’d sleep in a few hours now—she didn’t sleep when she came in from her job at night, a little after five in the morning. The girl who baby-sat for her—Rosemary Bandel, a neighbor girl—would be waiting for her and would leave and go across the street to her own house. And then the lights would glow over at Mary Rice’s for the rest of the night. Sometimes, if her windows were open, like now, I’d hear classical piano music, and once I even heard Alexander Scourby reading Great Expectations.
Sometimes, if I couldn’t sleep—my wife sleeping and dreaming away beside me—I’d get up out of bed and go upstairs and sit at the table and listen to her music, or her talking records, and wait for her to pass behind a curtain or until I saw her standing behind the window shade. Once in a while the phone rang over there at some early and unlikely hour, but she always picked it up on the third ring.
The names of her children, I found out, were Michael and Susan. To my eye they were no different from any of the other neighborhood kids, except when I’d see them I’d think, you kids are lucky to have a mother who sings to you. You don’t need your father. Once they came to our door selling bath soap, and another time they came around selling seeds. We didn’t have a garden, of course not—how could anything grow where we lived—but I bought some seeds anyway, what the hell. And on Halloween they came to the door, always with their baby-sitter—their mother was working, of course—and I gave them candy bars and nodded to Rosemary Bandel.
My wife and I have lived in this neighborhood longer than anyone. We’ve seen almost everyone come and go. Mary Rice and her husband and children moved in three years ago. Her husband worked for the telephone company as a lineman, and for a time he left every morning at seven o’clock and returned home in the evening at five. Then he stopped coming home at five. He came home later, or not at all.
My wife noticed it too. “I haven’t seen him home over there in three days,” she said.
“I haven’t either,” I said. I’d heard loud voices over there the other morning, and one or both of the children were crying.
Then at the market, my wife was told by the woman who lived on the other side of Mary Rice that Mary and her husband had separated. “He’s moved out on her and the children,” was what this woman said. “The son of a bitch.”
And then, not very long after, needing to support herself because her husband had quit his job and left town, Mary Rice had gone to work in this restaurant serving cocktails and, pretty soon, began staying up all night listening to music and talking records. And singing sometimes and humming other times. This same woman who lived next door to Mary Rice said she had enrolled in two correspondence courses from the university. She was making a new life for herself, this woman said, and the new life included her children too.
Winter was not so far away when I decided to put up the storm windows. When I was outside, using my ladder, those kids from next door, Michael and Susan, came charging out of the house with their dog and let the screen door bang shut behind them. They ran down the sidewalk in their coats, kicking piles of leaves.
Mary Rice came to the door and looked after them. Then she looked over at me.
“Hello there,” she said. “You’re getting ready for winter, I see.”
“Yes, I am,” I said. “It won’t be long.”
“No, it won’t,” she said. Then she waited a minute, as if she was going to say something else. Then she said, “It was nice talking to you.”
“My pleasure,” I answered.
That was just before Thanksgiving. About a week later, when I went into the bedroom with my wife’s coffee and juice, she was already awake and sitting up and ready to tell me her dream. She patted the bed beside her, and I sat down.
“This is one for the book,” she said. “Listen to this if you want to hear something.”
“Go on,” I said. I took a sip from her cup and handed it to her. She closed both hands around it as if her hands were cold.
“We were on a ship,” she said.
“We’ve never been on a ship,” I said.
“I know that, but we were on a ship, a big ship, a cruise ship, I guess. We were in bed, a bunk or something, when somebody knocked at the door with a tray of cupcakes. They came in, left the cupcakes and went out. I got out of bed and went to get one of the cupcakes. I was hungry, you see, but when I touched the cupcake it burned the tips of my fingers. Then my toes began to curl up—like they do when you’re scared? And then I got back in bed but I heard lou
d music—it was Scriabin—and then somebody began to rattle glasses, hundreds of glasses, maybe thousands of glasses, all of them rattling at once. I woke you up and told you about it, and you said you’d go to see what it was. While you were gone I remember seeing the moon go by outside, go by the porthole, and then the ship must have turned or something. Then the moon came by again and lit up the whole room. Then you came back, still in your pajamas, and got back in bed and went back to sleep without saying a word. The moon was shining right outside the window and everything in the room seemed to gleam, but still you didn’t say anything. I remember feeling a little afraid of you for not saying anything, and my toes started curling again. Then I went back to sleep—and here I am. What do you think of that? Isn’t that some dream? God. What do you make of it? You didn’t dream anything, did you?” She sipped from her coffee and watched me.
I shook my head. I didn’t know what to say, so all I said was that she had better put it in her notebook.
“God, I don’t know. They’re getting pretty weird. What do you think?”
“Put it in your book.”
Pretty soon it was Christmas. We bought a tree and put it up and on Christmas morning we exchanged gifts. Dotty bought me a new pair of mittens, a globe, and a subscription to Smithsonian magazine. I gave her a perfume—she blushed when she opened the little package—and a new nightgown. She hugged me. Then we drove across town to have dinner with some friends.
The weather became colder between Christmas and the first of the year. It snowed, and then it snowed again. Michael and Susan went outside long enough one day to build a snowman. They put a carrot in its mouth. At night I could see the glare of the TV in their bedroom window. Mary Rice kept going back and forth to work every evening, Rosemary came in to baby-sit, and every night and all night the lights burned over there.
On New Year’s Eve we drove across town to our friends’ for dinner again, played bridge, watched some TV and, promptly at midnight, opened a bottle of champagne. I shook hands with Harold and we smoked a cigar together. Then Dotty and I drove home.
Call if You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose Page 5
