Tell Me

by Mary Robison

  He had lent her twenty bucks, in fact. Connie was her name. Last June, maybe, when his garden was at its peak. He’d been out there positioning the sprinkler, first thing in the morning, when a cab swerved up and she was in back. She had rolled down her window and started explaining to him. She was coming in to work early but had ridden the whole way without realizing she’d brought an empty handbag. She showed it to him—a beige clutch. She even undid the clasp and held the bag out the window.

  Now she waved a twenty as Buddy opened the door.

  “That isn’t necessary, Connie,” he said.

  She thanked him with a nod for remembering her name. She said, “Don’t give me any argument.” She came close and tucked the bill into his shirt pocket. “You see here?” she said. “This is already done.”

  “Well, I thank you,” Buddy said. He stroked the pocket, smoothing the folded money flat. It was a blue cotton shirt he’d put on an hour earlier when he got home from having his hair cut.

  She was still close and wearing wonderful perfume but he didn’t think he should remark on that. He kept his eyes level and waited as if she were a customer and he a clerk. He said, “So, are you still in the neighborhood? I rarely see you.”

  “They haven’t needed me.” She pretended a pout. “Nobody’s needed me.” She stepped back. It was the first week of September, still mild. She wore a fitted navy dress with a white collar and had a red cardigan sweater over her arms. Her large shapely legs were in sheer stockings.

  “We have one last problem,” she said. She held up a finger.

  He looked at her, his eyebrows lifted.

  Her hand fell and she gazed off and spoke as if reading, as if her words were printed over in the sky there to the right. “I have a crush on you,” she said. “Such a crush on you, Buddy. The worst, most ungodly crush.”

  “No, you don’t. You couldn’t.”

  “The, worst, crush.”

  “Well,” Buddy said. “Well dee well-dell-dell.”

  •

  He owned the house—a two-story, low-country cottage. It was set on a lane that led into Indian Town and beyond that were the roads and highways into North Pennsylvania. He sat on a divan near a window in the living room now and, in the noon light, looked through some magazines and at a book about birds.

  He had a view from this window. Behind the house stood a tall ravine and Buddy could see through its vines and trees to the banks of Likely Lake.

  His son had died after an accident there. Three years ago, August. Matthew. When he was two days short of turning twenty-one. His Jet Ski had hit a fishing boat that slid out of an inlet. The August after that, Buddy’s wife left him.

  He had stopped going out—what his therapist referred to as “isolating.” He knocked the walls off his son’s bedroom suite and off the room where Ruthie used to sew and converted the whole upper floor into a studio. He began bringing all his assignments home. He was a draftsman, the senior draftsman at Qualitec, a firm of electromechanical engineers he had worked with for years.

  “Beware of getting out of touch,” his therapist had warned. “It happens gradually. It creeps over you by degrees. When you’re not interacting with people, you start losing the beat. Then blammo. Suddenly, you’re that guy in the yard.”

  “I’m who?” asked Buddy.

  “The guy with the too-short pants,” said the therapist.

  •

  He would dissuade the Connie woman, Buddy told himself now as he poked around in the kitchen. He yanked open a drawer and considered its contents, extracted a vegetable peeler, put it back in its place. He would dissuade her nicely. He didn’t want to make her feel like a bug. “Let her down easy,” he said aloud and both the cats spurted in to study him. Buddy had never learned to tell the cats apart. They were everyday cats, middle-sized and yellow. Matt’s girlfriend Shay had presented them as kittens, for a birthday present, the same week he died. The cats stayed indoors now and kept close to Buddy. He called one of them Bruce and the other Bruce’s Brother.

  He went into a utility closet off the kitchen now and rolled out a canister vacuum. He liked vacuuming. He liked jobs he could quickly complete. And he wanted things just so when Elise came over tonight. She had changed things for him in the months since they had met. Everything was different because of her.

  One way to go with the Connie woman he was thinking, would be to parenthetically mention Elise. That might have its effect. Or a stronger method would be to say, “My girlfriend is the jealous type,” or some such.

  The cats padded along into the dining area and watched as Buddy positioned the vacuum and unwound its mile of electric cord. “Don’t ever touch a plug like this,” he told them. “It is hot, hot, hot.”

  •

  Elise phoned from work around two. She was a group counselor at Cherry Trees, a psychiatric hospital over in the medical park. Buddy saw his therapist in another building on the grounds and he had met Elise there, in fact, in the parking area. It was on a snowy day last February when he’d forgotten and left his fog lights burning. She had used yellow jumper cables to rescue him. Buddy had invited her to go for coffee and the two of them had driven off in his black Mercury, zooming along the Old Post Highway to get the car battery juiced.

  They ended up having lunch at a French place, where Elise put on horn-rimmed glasses and read aloud from the menu. Without the glasses, she reminded him of Jean Arthur—her figure, the freckles and bouncy, curly hair. Elise’s French was awful and full of oinky sounds but Buddy liked her for trying it anyway. He liked her laugh, which went up and came down.

  “Vincent escaped,” she said now on the phone. “He broke out somehow. From right in the middle of a Life Challenges Meeting.”

  “I’m fortunate I don’t know what that is,” Buddy said.

  “The problem for me is, with Vincent loose and Security looking for him, I can’t take my people outside. Which means no Smoke Walk.”

  “Right, because you’re the only one with a lighter. So that they have to trail along behind you.”

  “Well, they’re not dogs. But they’re getting mighty grumpy. And being critical of Vincent. They think he should be shot.”

  “Hard to know whose side to take,” said Buddy.

  “That it is,” Elise said, and told him she had to go.

  •

  This flower garden was Buddy’s first, but gorgeous. He no longer understood people who spoiled and killed plants. The therapist had suggested gardening, so one Saturday when Elise was free, she and Buddy went to Tristie’s Arboretum and bought starter materials. She also helped shape the garden. They put in a design like a collar around the court and walk.

  Buddy had watered, fed, and misted his flowers. With each day they bloomed, grew large, stood tall. “What more could I ask of you?” he asked them. “Nuts and fruit?”

  He thought he might recruit Elise to help lay in winter pansies around the side porch if that didn’t seem boring. She was good at a hundred things. She could play bridge and poker and shuffle cards. She could play the piano. She liked listening to jazz and she knew most of it. They’d dress up and go dancing at Sky Mountain or at the Allegheny Club, where there was an orchestra. Elise had beautiful evening clothes. She’d take him to all kinds of things—to midnight movies or a raunchy comedy club. Last spring they’d even taken a train trip to New Orleans for Jazz Fest.

  From close by, Buddy heard a woman’s voice and froze. It might be Connie’s. He didn’t feel up to another encounter with her just yet. She seemed interesting and he liked her. She certainly was a handsome woman. She had mentioned peeking out her office window, how she always found herself watching for him. That was flattering, but still. He’d felt jarred by it. What if he were just out on some stupid errand, grabbing the paper or the mail out of the box, if he hadn’t shaved or his shirt was on sideways?

  The voice came a second time. It was not Connie’s. However, the next one might be, he warned himself. He shook off his gloves and poked his to
ols back in their wire caddy. It was four something. She probably got off work pretty soon.

  •

  As he scrubbed his hands, he rehearsed telling Elise the Connie story. Elise was coming over for dinner tonight after she finished her shift.

  He started organizing the food he had bought earlier at the farmer’s market. He got out a lemon and some lettuce in cello wrap, a net bag of radishes, a plum tomato. He heaped what he wanted of that into a wooden bowl; returned to the refrigerator and ripped a few sprigs of parsley. “Less like a picnic,” he said to himself. He arranged a serving plate with slices of honey-baked ham; another with deviled egg halves and used the parsley for garnish. He knew he was not a great cook. With the exception of the jumbo shrimp he had grilled for Elise and her mom on July 4th. Those were delicious.

  He carried the serving dishes into the dining room. It was too soon but he wanted to try the food to see how it looked set on the table. He got out a big linen tablecloth, gripped it by the ends, and flapped it hugely in the air to wave out the folds.

  The cats somersaulted in. They leaped onto the sideboard. They stood poised and still and gazed at the platter of ham.

  “Scary monster,” Buddy told them, but sighed and dropped the tablecloth. He marched the ham back to the kitchen and hid it deep inside the refrigerator.

  Elise knew a lot, in his opinion. She’d earned a degree in social psych and she was popular with the patients at Cherry Trees. Maybe he would skip complaining to her about Connie. That could only cause worry. He should be more circumspect. Why bother Elise?

  He did call, but merely to ask how she was doing and to confirm their dinner plans. “I don’t want anything,” he said when she came to the phone.

  “They sent Martha to the Time Out Room,” Elise said. “The woman admitted last Saturday? You should see her now, though. Calm and quiet. Like she’s had some realizations. Or been given back her doll.”

  “Who else is in your group?” Buddy asked. “I know you’ve told me.”

  “Well, it’s evil and immoral that I did and I’ll probably roast in hell for it. Donna, with the mysterious migraines. She’s been here the longest. Next is Lorraine, the obsessive one who bought a hundred clear plastic tote bags. Barry, the E.R. nurse. He’s tired, is all that’s wrong with that man. And there’s Doug, the pilot-error guy. Martha. Vincent. Oh, and the new girl. I love her! She reminds me of somebody. Kim Novak maybe.”

  “Then I love her too,” Buddy said.

  “Or she’s one of the Gabors. With her collar turned up? Always dancing and singing with a scarf tied on her wrist, like this is a musical. I have to go, Buddy.”

  “I know you do,” he said. “How’d they make out with Vincent? They captured him yet?”

  “No, unfortunately. But he has been seen. Well, of course, he’s been seen! At practically every patient’s window. And in their closets. Or he’s standing right beside them in the mirror.”

  “Don’t make jokes,” Buddy said.

  “No, I have to,” said Elise, and she clicked off.

  •

  Buddy had the dinner table all prepared and he wanted to start the candles. He had read on the carton that the wicks would flame more evenly if lighted once in advance. He went hunting for stick matches, which weren’t where they were supposed to be, in the cabinet over the stove. The sun was going down and he glanced through the sliding glass doors to the side porch. Connie was here, sitting in the swing, mechanically rocking an end of it. She held a cigarette and was staring ardently at the floor.

  Buddy forgot himself for a second. He wasn’t sure what to do. He crept out of the room, turned around, and came back.

  “Nine one one,” he said to the cats before he slid the door and took himself outside.

  “So, what’s shaking?” he asked. He made an unconcerned walk across the porch and to the railing. Half the sky had grown purple. There were red clouds twisted like a rope above the lake.

  Connie went on gazing at the floorboards but stopped the swing with the heels of her shoes. They were snakeskin or lizard, very dark maroon. “Don’t be mad,” she said.

  “I’m not,” said Buddy.

  “I like to sit in strange places, don’t you? Especially if it’s someone else’s place. I play a little game of seeing what effect it has on them.”

  The curve of her throat when she looked up now was lovely. That surprised Buddy out of making a comment on the game.

  “I wonder if it’s ever occurred to you,” she said. “These past two summers. The drought, right? You’ve heard about it on the news. You probably aren’t aware that I live in Langley. My father and I. You always hear it called ‘Scrap Pile’ but it’s Langley. It is poor and it’s all wrecked. Of course, my father didn’t guess that would happen when he inherited our house. This is only about eight miles—”

  “Isn’t that … Crabapple?” Buddy asked.

  “No, it isn’t. Crabapple’s about twelve miles. Or was, it hardly exists anymore. But you wouldn’t go there, so that’s part of my point.”

  Buddy shuffled over and lowered himself next to her in the swing.

  “When I’m coming to work?” She spoke straight into his face. “It gets greener. And greener. Until it’s this lush—I don’t know what. There’s no drought here. You folks don’t have a drought.”

  Buddy was nodding slowly. “I’m ashamed to admit it.…”

  Connie exhaled smoke and now rearranged something in herself, as if she were closing one folder and opening the next. “I feel very embarrassed. About the confession I made to you earlier,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said, and laughed once. “It’s not like I could mind.”

  “Horseshit.” She rose in her seat and flicked her cigarette expertly across the porch into a huddle of Savannas shrubs.

  “Connie, my girlfriend is a counselor over at Cherry Trees.”

  “What about it?” she asked, and Buddy winced.

  “Sorry,” he said, as they both nodded and shrugged.

  “You people.” Her hand worked in the air. She clutched at nothing, let it go.

  She said, “I am happy about this much. I’ve finally been at my job long enough that I’ve earned some time off for the things I enjoy. Such as travel.”

  “Where to?” Buddy asked.

  “I’m thinking Belize,” Connie said, and after a moment, “I’ve heard you don’t really go anywhere. Mr. Secrest or someone said. No, it was he. He knew your wife. He said you hardly ever go out since your son died.”

  “That’s mostly correct.”

  She said, “I didn’t mean it as a criticism.”

  •

  The phone began ringing and—certain the caller was Elise—Buddy apologized, scooted off the swing, and hurried inside.

  “I’ll never get out of here,” Elise said. “I know it ruins our plans. There’s no alternative.”

  “It doesn’t matter. We’ll do it tomorrow.”

  “Everyone’s so spooked I wouldn’t dare leave. And the nurses have them so doped up on sedatives. You should see this, Buddy. They could hurt themselves. It’s like they’re walking on shipboard.”

  He was smiling.

  “It’s because we’re now told that Vincent is inside the hospital. So there’s an all-out search,” she said. “Anyway, I did one thing. I raced over to Blockbuster and rented them a movie—The Matrix, is what they voted for. That is helping. It’s got them focused. All in their pajamas, all in the Tomorrow Room with their bed pillows, doubled up on the couches and lying over chairs.”

  “I want to do that. That sounds great!”

  “No, you’re not invited,” said Elise.

  She giggled at something on her end and said to Buddy, “You remember how I said they’re always nicknaming the psychiatrists? I just heard, ‘Here comes Dr. Post-It-Note accompanying Drs. Liar and Deaf.’”

  “My therapist looks like Al Haig.”

  “That’s … See, you don’t belong here,” Elise said.

  “
I’ll call you later on,” she told him.

  From where he stood, he’d been viewing his dining room setup. His table had crystal, candlesticks, and thirty red chrysanthemums in a vase. He hadn’t realized, until the line went dead, how very sharp was his disappointment.

  •

  He had stepped down off the porch to inspect the walkway where a couple slate tiles had strayed out of line. He was stooped over, prompting a piece back into place with his shoe. Here were weeds. Here were ants, too, crawling in a long, contorted file.

  Connie watched him, smoking hard and unhappily, still in the swing. “I need to say a few things. About my feelings,” she said.

  He stuffed his hands in his pockets and rejoined her on the porch. He leaned on the far railing, facing her. They were quiet a moment. “I’m sorry. I’m an oaf,” he said.

  She answered that silently and with a brief, sarcastic smile.

  He said, “I do want to hear.”

  She looked at the ceiling.

  “O.K., I probably just don’t understand then, Connie.” He brought his hands from his pockets, bunched his fingers, and consulted them. “Is it that you have a kind of fantasy about me?”

  “God, no!” she said, and clicked her tongue. “It’s actually a little more adult than that.” She pronounced the word “aah-dult.”

  Her smile grew reproachful. “So you know all about my feelings.”

  “Oh, I don’t think that.”

  She said, “Since you’re Mister Perfect.” She began fussing with the cultured pearl in her ear. “Bet you wish I’d kept my feelings to my own fuckin’ self.”

  It was one of the unhappiest conversations Buddy could recall. “I really don’t think any of that,” he said.

  Connie’s long legs were folded now with her feet tucked to the side. She had the grace of someone who had been an athlete or a dancer. And she used her hands prettily, holding one in the other or touching the prim white collar on her dress. Her hair was fascinating—a gleaming black. But there was sorrow in her eyes, or so Buddy thought. They moved slowly, when they did move. Her gaze seldom shifted. Her eyes were heavy, and gave an impression of defeat.