by Gail Godwin
At the long table under the green shaded lamp in Lovegood’s library, Feron began “Bus Trip” over again.
Nora, on her way to a new life, was traveling long distance on a Greyhound bus. Spreading out her belongings on the empty seat next to her, she arranged her face to look as unwelcoming as possible to anyone who might have the nerve to ask, “Is this seat taken?”
Twice a week, Miss Olafson gave tennis lessons to Feron Hood.
It was an “extra” for which the uncle had laid out an additional $100 a semester, the college and the instructor splitting the fee.
“How much tennis have you played, Feron?”
“Not much. Well, none, to be exact.”
“Great!”
“Great?”
“You have no bad habits to break. Try this racquet. How does it feel? It should have a nice heft, but not feel weighty. Today I’m going to hit balls to you over the net. Try to hit them back, but if you miss one, let it go. I have a whole bucketful here.”
The gym teacher had the most streamlined figure Feron had ever seen on a woman. Her tanned upper arms curved sleekly where most females, even young ones, had flab. She bounced from foot to foot in her tennis shoes, and you could see the muscles in her calves take on different shapes. Her white-blonde hair was cut so it flopped when she moved, but the neck was shaved like a boy’s. She was always in a good mood and had a wonderful, startled laugh, as if you had surprised her. Feron imagined the evenings with Miss Petrie in their shared apartment. Did they talk about their students? Who cooked, or did they take turns? If her name should come up, what would each of them say about her?
Bus Trip
By Feron Hood
Nora boarded a Greyhound bus that she hoped would take her as far away as possible from the life she was leaving behind. Choosing a window seat midway down the aisle, she spread her belongings over the empty seat beside her and composed her face into an unfriendly mask to deter anyone from daring to ask, “Is this seat occupied?”
Across the aisle was a teenage boy with acne, shoveling peanuts from a greasy paper bag into his mouth. In the row ahead of her sat an old lady who coughed on an average of every two minutes. It was an apologetic cough, as though she expected someone to cry out, “Shut up, old lady. I’m trying to sleep.”
It got dark. Dark felt safer to Nora, but the steady rocking of the bus combined with the exhaust fumes made her queasy. There was a pale, dark-haired man in a dark coat who kept going to and from the toilet cubicle in the rear. Nora kept her head down each time he passed her seat. On one return trip he paused long enough for her to be preparing a rejection if he asked to sit down. But then he continued up the aisle again.
Nora was at the point where the reasons for her escape had started intruding on the present reality of it, when a woman teetering back from the toilet swayed and fell into the seat beside her.
“Oh, dear, I’m so sorry. I lost my balance. These bus rides are exhausting, aren’t they? And boring! Don’t you agree? I hope you are on your way to a destination happier than mine.”
It was the strangest conversation. Nora was aware of herself speaking back in the intervals, but it was as if she only provided a sounding board for the woman’s monologue. At first the woman had seemed younger, but as the passing traffic lights played across her face, Nora saw that she was probably in her forties and the worse for wear. The alcohol from her breath drowned out the exhaust fumes coming from the bus. She spoke quickly and breathlessly, like she was reciting from a list of grievances that had been saving themselves up for a listener.
“I ask myself, at what point did you take the wrong turning? Was it my first marriage? My second? On the other hand, the rot may have set in earlier. Much earlier! When did I start lying and beguiling my way through life? Was I born a liar and a beguiler? I’m not a churchgoer, but I know some people believe in ‘original sin’ and some others believe in ‘predestination.’ Either way, you don’t have a chance, your fate is decided already. But since I don’t belong to any church, does this mean I am excused because I didn’t know better? My first husband got me pregnant before he was my husband. I soon kicked him out and returned to my parents’ house with ‘the wages of my sin,’ my baby daughter. Then some years passed and I knew I would die of boredom and claustrophobia if I didn’t get away from my parents. Oh, by the way, my first husband taught me to drink. He was a master of the bottle. Husband number two, when he came along, he didn’t drink or smoke. I did both so there were two strikes against me from the start. He was a sanctimonious bully. You had to play by his rules. He hit me, he hit my little girl. I tried to protect her, but it wasn’t easy. Then he stopped hitting her. But he couldn’t keep his hands off her in a different way.
“So, dearie, huddling over there so confident and untried in your window seat, I wish you good luck on your journey. May it land you somewhere happier than mine did. Now I think I’m steady enough to make it back to my own seat and take another pull from my little pint of oblivion. When I wake up, I’ll have a headache and won’t remember a word of what I said. I won’t even remember you!”
Dear Feron,
“Bus Trip” left me with some questions but continues to resonate in my mind. Your sensory details are first-rate. I smell that bus. I feel the slight nausea from its steady rocking. I see the other passengers, the boy eating peanuts from a greasy bag, the old lady with the “apologetic cough.” (Very nice.) And the sinister dark-haired man in a dark coat.
But when the inebriated woman, returning from the toilet, falls into the seat next to Nora, I am completely gripped. And the skillful way you set up the exchange they are about to have, ruling out the prospect of back-and-forth dialogue, is ideal for this scene. (And the woman’s list of grievances “that had been saving themselves up for a listener” was also a wonderful touch.)
Her monologue is sad and distressing. I thought the whole “original sin”/“predestination”/“am I excused?” questions she asks were astute, and her parting words, about forgetting everything in the morning, is all too realistic. Few writers, even the seasoned ones, can portray a fully human drunk person. It is so easy to fall into satire or disdain.
However, “Bus Trip” in its present form is not a story. I don’t know Nora’s background, other than it was something she wanted to leave behind, and I don’t have any hint of where she’s going. If you were to work more on the story, you might include that information without destroying the organic form. Though, mind you, I’m not certain of this!
But as for the woman who collapses beside Nora, you should be proud of creating such a poignant human being in such a short passage. I hope you will keep writing. You seem to have a natural gift!
Maud Petrie
9
The population of Pullen, North Carolina, was a little over three thousand. Any able-bodied person with the right kind of map could walk its landlocked area of 3.2 square miles in an hour. Pullen came into being in 1867, when lots went up for sale around a new railway station. It was chartered as a town in 1873, and was still called “The Railway Town.”
Feron Hood came into being in 1940 because her mother-to-be was sitting on a porch in Pullen playing bridge with her girlfriends when a navy ensign swung by on crutches. He would return to his base as soon as his broken ankle, caused by a stupid move on the tennis court, healed. In passing, he asked the bridge players who was winning, and Feron’s future mother said, “Come up on the porch and see.” The future mother’s father was a railroad man, recently transferred to Pullen.
Since Pullen had become Feron’s home address, she gave more thought than ever before to this fluke meeting of two people who had seen fit to part company in less than a year. What had been the attraction?
Looks? Looks had to be described right off the bat in magazine stories. All the main characters needed to have looks. The “good” female was usually blonde and blue-eyed and the “good” male was dark-haired and dark-eyed. It was an agreed-upon formula. (Even in Merry’s “
Lingering on the Lawn,” the good “optimistic” girl was blonde, and the “complicated” girl was dark.) Both Feron’s progenitors were at the attractive end of the spectrum, though neither possessed startling good looks. Of course Feron had no memory of her father, only a snapshot her mother reluctantly showed her, but she could recall thinking as a young child how pretty her mother was. Before the alcohol started showing.
Availability in a boring town might have been a factor. Now that Feron had become acquainted with Pullen’s 3.2 square miles, she thought this was a distinct possibility.
When she asked Uncle Rowan why her parents had gotten married, he said, “Oh, honey, it was a wartime romance. Or, wait, pre-wartime. We hadn’t entered the war yet, but your father had joined the navy.” When she put the question to his less diplomatic sister, Aunt Mabel curtly replied, “They had to.”
Feron lived at Aunt Mabel’s because Uncle Rowan said it was proper and his bachelor house lacked the amenities.
“Why didn’t he ever marry?” she asked Aunt Mabel.
“He did once, down in Mexico, when he was three sheets to the wind. The girl’s Catholic family had it annulled. Now he and Blanche Buttner have the perfect setup. They’ve been ‘engaged’ for fifteen years. They court at her antebellum house and she avoids his. You’ve seen it. Shirts in their laundry wrappers stacked on the sofa, a lemon and a tin of sardines in the Frigidaire, dust in the corners overlooked by his slapdash cleaning woman.”
Feron had liked Uncle Rowan at once. When she had first climbed the wooden stairs to his office, put down her suitcase, and announced who she was, he had stared hard at her, said “You’re one of us, all right,” looked about to cry, then pulled himself together and asked if she’d had breakfast.
He was a large, raw-boned man, with hound-dog cheeks and a sparse moustache. His hair was mostly white and brilliantined. He rocked rather than walked because his long legs seemed to want to go their separate ways. He was generous to a fault (“He likes people to think he’s richer than he is,” said Aunt Mabel).
“Oh, honey, he never did take care of himself ” was Uncle Rowan’s answer when Feron asked him how her father had died.
“He drank himself to death,” Aunt Mabel said. “The liver can only take so much, and he started while he was still in short pants. I still miss Woody. Pity you didn’t get to know him. He was the sweet one in the family. Our oldest brother, Simon, died so long ago we sometimes forget to include him. He was just twenty-three when they gave him a spinal in the operating room and he never woke up. Woody was also the best-looking brother. We all have the long cheeks and droopy eyelids, but on Woody the proportions were just right. You favor your uncle Rowan more than you do your father.”
Feron slept in the front bedroom, formerly the master bedroom of Aunt Mabel and her late husband. “I always hated this room,” Aunt Mabel remarked casually as she helped Feron hang her clothes in the closet. Aunt Mabel slept in a small back room overlooking the garden.
Perched on the dresser’s starched antimacassar in Feron’s bedroom were framed pictures of Aunt Mabel and Uncle Dave on their wedding day and little Davey, age three, who now worked as an engineer in Seattle, scowling at a ball he held in his lap.
Among family pictures in the living room was a stout woman in a dark dress standing in front of a fence. Her forehead was creased, and she looked miffed about something. Her right hand braced her hip, and her left hand was curled in a fist. This was Mabel’s grandmother, which meant she was also Feron’s uncle’s and her father’s grandmother. This was the woman Sophie Sewell Hood had become: Feron’s frowning great-grandmother, who got her into Lovegood’s Daughters and Granddaughters Club.
“Can you remember what your grandmother was like?” Feron asked Aunt Mabel.
“Granny Hood. We children called her Old Witchie Crosspatch. Our parents would threaten to send us to stay with her when we were bad. She was a hard woman.”
“How ‘hard’?”
“Well, she didn’t have much use for people, even her own kin. She preferred her goats and chickens. She made us drink goat milk, and if we even thought about being bad, she said we’d have to sleep in the henhouse.”
“Did you ever sleep in the henhouse?”
“No, but I still can’t pass a henhouse today without feeling scared. And I’d rather die than drink another glass of goat milk.”
“What about her husband?”
“He had died so long ago none of us remembered him. Grandfather Rowan was said to have been ‘easygoing,’ but that can mean any number of things, can’t it?”
“So he was named Rowan, too.”
“Yes. They had one child that lived. They named him Marcus. That was our father. I’m surprised you care about this family stuff, since you weren’t a part of it growing up.”
Feron decided not to mention the Daughters and Granddaughters club to Aunt Mabel, who might question her right to be in such a club when Feron hadn’t even grown up knowing the Hoods.
She lay in the double bed that didn’t seem wide enough for a married couple and thought about her father and mother. Were they both already drinkers when her future mother had called, “Come up on the porch and see”? Had her future mother already had a few cocktails that day? Feron had grown up smelling her mother’s alcohol breath. Her stepfather, Swain, who needed to be sober for flying, found her mother’s habit disgusting and said her whisky smell kept him from sleeping. Maybe her father and mother had been drunk when they started her.
Or maybe bored and drunk.
During Thanksgiving break, Feron walked the blocks of the town, which was laid out in a grid: uptown with courthouse, stores, law offices, library; then the “good” street, where Aunt Mabel lived, paralleled by a second-tier street, where Uncle Rowan lived in a bungalow with his packaged shirts and his lemon and sardines. Farther down came the not-so-good white streets and, last of all, the houses of the colored people. Then there was open field, and on the far side of the field was Pullen’s cemetery. Feron visited her father’s stone—how sad, he had barely lived to the age of thirty-four—and the stones of the other family members. There were lots of Hoods, going back to 1800, and a great many Pullens, which wasn’t a surprise.
Feron had kept her surname, but her mother had paid for it. When Swain was officially adopting her, he put up a fight to replace Hood with Eckert. Her mother stood up for Hood (“She’s already Hood to her friends and it has a nicer sound, it suits her.”) until Swain knocked her down and caused another miscarriage. After that, the name change wasn’t mentioned again. That Feron’s mother never carried a pregnancy to full term Swain construed as her secret wish not to have his child.
For such a little town, Pullen boasted an excellent library. It had the newest books, protected by clear plastic book covers. On its shelves were several volumes of Chekhov’s stories. Wishing Miss Petrie could be looking down from above, Feron sat down at a long table and picked and chose among the stories. She went for the ones whose titles or openings attracted her. The titles themselves were short, a person’s name or a universal subject that could take place anywhere, at any time: “Anyuta” (the one about the naked girl and the medical student Miss Petrie had read to them!), “The Doctor,” “The Schoolmistress,” “In the Court,” “The Runaway,” “A Misfortune,” “A Story Without an End.”
You never knew what the people in his stories were going to do or what life was going to do to them. A lonely schoolmistress is being driven home in a cart after picking up her salary, and a prosperous, handsome acquaintance in a four-horse carriage stops to talk to her. He is past his prime and smells of alcohol, but it crosses her mind that if she were this man’s wife, she could save him. Later in the story, after a mishap with the cart in an overflowing stream, she and the cart driver are stopped at a barrier waiting for the train to pass. Standing on the little platform between the two first-class carriages is a lady who has rich hair exactly like the schoolmistress’s late mother. This floods the schoolteacher
’s heart with memories of when she was young and lovely and safe in a bright Moscow room among her own people. Remembering every tiny detail down to the family aquarium with its little fish, she presses her hands to her temple in an ecstasy of nostalgia and begins crying. At that moment the prosperous alcoholic man pulls up beside her in his carriage and she imagines a happiness she never had. Her dreary years as a schoolmistress seem like a bad dream and she greets him as an equal and a friend. Then the prosperous man in his four-horse carriage crosses the tracks and goes on his way, her ecstasy vanishes, and presently the cart driver announces they are home.
“With Chekhov you just can’t predict” she imagined saying in a private conference with Miss Petrie. And then maybe adding, if the mood was right, “I guess I was thinking of Chekhov when I was vague about Nora’s past and future in my story. You taught us to accept being left in uncertainty, but maybe I went a little too far.”
If Chekhov had written a story called “Inquest,” it might have opened with the coroner’s summation: there had been no foul play in the case of X’s wife’s death. The widower, who had wept through the entire proceedings and won everyone’s sympathy, would murmur to the girl as they left the court: “I am going to forgive you for starting that crazy rumor, but as long as you’re a minor in my house, you’ll toe the line or I’ll commit you to an institution.” As they are walking away, onlookers comment on the plight of the unfortunate man. “Bad luck to be stuck with that snooty stepdaughter who ruined his reputation. Did you notice, during the entire proceedings she didn’t shed a single tear?”
A story called “The Bus Trip,” in the Chekhovian style, might open like “Typhus,” with the main character traveling on public transportation. Only instead of being aboard the smoking carriage of the mail train, like the young lieutenant coming down with typhus, the runaway girl would be aboard a Greyhound bus, still in shock from having stolen Swain’s hidden roll of cash and committing blackmail in writing. (“If you come after me, I will tell all the things I didn’t tell: how many times you wished Mother dead, the time you caused her miscarriage, the time you ruined my tooth, and about the nights you came into my room and stuck your filthy hand up my nightgown.”)
