Scratched

by Elizabeth Tallent

  He is a student, it turns out, but also a local in the sense that he lives in the attic of his family’s gingerbread Victorian on a street of century-old sycamores and oaks. When his parents go to the Virgin Islands for ten days and I spend those nights in his bed on the floor, we wake to birdsong, though song scarcely seems to cover this bombardment. It’s crazy, I tell his barely awake back, and he rolls over, props his chin on his forearm, and answers What’s crazy is you never heard this before. Downstairs, he scrapes what’s left in a can into the bowl belonging to his mother’s toy poodle and holds the fork for her to lick, cooing Sad so sad oh I know ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone. To me—in just his shirt, and of that shirt a mere two buttons buttoned, I’m in a movie of my own, it’s a French movie, I Brigitte Bardot my way across his mother’s kitchen—he says Not too broke up to eat though, is she. He gives the bowl a nudge; she growls through the skittery swivel necessary to keep her nose down in the food. The dawn chorus, he tells me. We’ve got to get you out of that dorm more often. After the family dairy farm in Minnesota was auctioned off by the bank and we could have gone anywhere—California, even, his father had picked Normal, Illinois, on the grounds that a university is always going to need welding. His dad is a welder turned contractor, two years from becoming a millionaire, at which point they’ll pack up and move again, this time to a modernist ranch in the town’s second-fanciest suburb, wall-to-ceiling windows his long-legged redheaded mother tends with crumpled newspaper and turquoise Windex, shag carpeting, fieldstone fireplace, basement apartment kept immaculate by its tenant, his older sister; for his parents a chandeliered Vegas suite, king bed lorded over by the toy poodle; and for his father alone, supplementing the big welding shop on the town’s industrial outskirts, a converted garage where the snarling of power tools causes no disturbance and neither do the Playmates staple-gunned to the drywall.

  He’s three years older than me but still some distance from graduation. The problems he’s run into in various classes are due to his working essentially full-time on a roofing crew. If he asked, his parents would pay his tuition, but a predilection for working hard runs in his family, and he prefers the exhaustion of the body to that of the mind. He may believe his father esteems him more for holding down a job while finishing the BA in business administration his self-made father doubts the need for—not aloud, because that would be hurtful, and in his family they’re not hurtful. In the years between that morning in the kitchen and my early completion of my own undergraduate degree, I spend as much time as possible—more than my boyfriend wants us to—in that old Victorian and the fancier house that comes after. Often I feel like a spy sent to figure out how they manage such nonhurtfulness.

  Part of his charm turns out to be that he’s less reliable than I’d assumed—less interested in being reliable, in fact superstitiously inclined to relish whatever harm befalls him as fated. Working as a roofer entails risks to his body, his face, to his beauty, because he possesses a blond, small-scale, straight-browed masculine beauty that leaves him indifferent, worse than indifferent, it’s as if he’s had to filthy it up: his forearms and knuckles are welted and scarred, his nape bears a permanent redneck burn, his nose broken three times, maybe four, and on the muscled chest so taut-skinned it’s almost glossy, the rude keloid welt left when a doctor, without explaining what was about to happen, much less asking the boy’s—his—consent, removed, along with the nipple, the ominous black mole impinging on it, whose growth had scared the boy’s long-legged, redheaded mother, who for some reason permitted her son to watch as the nipple was excised, forceps depositing the gore in a stainless steel tray the nurse whipped out of sight, not before he thought That’s mine, and next the boy—he—observed the blotting, the soaking up of blood, the margins bound like lips sewn shut with black thread. And so? I ask, and he says, puzzled, So? So was it cancer? I ask, and he says I don’t know if they tested it. If my mother ever asked, and I say So it could’ve been for nothing. He nods. Could have. Yeah. But that’s how they were then. Just went ahead and cut it out of you. I say And never a sign since, of anything? He says Nah, never any trace, if it was I guess he got it, and though the complete eradication of cancer, if that’s what it was, might serve as partial justification for the peremptoriness shown by the doctor, it’s in saying He got it that his voice turns hostile. Not far below his easygoingness lurks a compressed truculence, but predicting its appearances is then and will always be beyond me. Occasionally his old Chevrolet breaks down, and when we are halted on the road shoulder he gets his tools from the trunk and tells me to pop the hood so he can prop it open with the long metal rod and then leans in over the engine and then as if the problem is bound to defeat him he walks away to smoke a cigarette. If we are out in the country he doesn’t bother with the road shoulder but saunters down the middle, and even if there hasn’t been another car for hours, even if an approaching vehicle will be visible well before it reaches him where he stalls, smoking and musing, on the yellow line, this habit of his unnerves me, he turns stubborn when I try to talk him out of it and says he’s always done it and it’s always helped him think, in the passenger seat I keep twisting to study the road behind, it’s as if I fear some invisible car might come at him, or a car that for whatever reason causes him to stand mesmerized as it closes in, or maybe it’s him I don’t trust, it’s not hard to imagine him choosing to stay where he is, facing down an oncoming car, the lord and owner of the two-lane highway, fixed in place by the daredeviltry that overtakes him out of the blue, in the passenger seat I am continually imagining the wind-suck of some stranger’s car furying past, inches to spare. He comes sauntering back, he fixes whatever’s wrong.

  When he gets his own place, the second-floor apartment of a run-down Victorian across town from campus, I seize the chance to move out of the house I share with five other sophomore women. Their membership in a sorority as yet unable to offer them housing unifies them, while I’m a stray. The smallness and undemandingness of our college attract the ambivalent, plenty of whom fail to return for sophomore year, among them my freshman-year roommate, who had written from Cortez, Colorado, saying that her brother got drafted and under the circumstances her parents decided a community college would suit her better than faraway Illinois. I send her my copy of Sisterhood Is Powerful, she sends a Polaroid of herself and her brother, two sunburned kids bareback on an Appaloosa, and though it’s two or three years before I quit writing, that’s the last letter I get back. I never find out if her brother got home, or whether she was able to realize her plan of attending nursing school. Thus I end up among the sorority sisters, whose ritual is to stop whatever they’re doing for the Star Trek reruns that come on every weekday afternoon at 4:30; they’ve planned their course schedules so they can sit cross-legged painting their toenails, eating popcorn, speculating about what Spock would be like in bed, they’ve never said so much as an unkind word to me but I’m crazy to get out of there, and when I pack up and leave, the scandalized landlady writes my mother and father to inform them their daughter has moved in with her boyfriend, and my mother and father drive down to Normal, phoning, first, to arrange to pick me up at the house I’ve left. To my surprise the other girls had been willing to perpetuate the sham of my still living there. When the sorority sisters—even opening the front door, they do in the plural—greet my parents, the sisters must appear hurtfully poised, other people’s obedient daughters, their small talk prettily effusive in contrast to my hanging-back awkwardness. After five minutes’ So nice to meet yous, they ask if I want to go for a drive, an invitation that alarms me by being an invitation. Since when have I, their child, needed polite asking? And since when did we go for drives? The tens of thousands of miles we’d traveled in our station wagon were mapped out in detail; every drive had a point. We didn’t just wander around wasting gas, but the conversation they have in mind would have been impossible in, say, a restaurant, where my taste for what they call overdramatizing would be bound to excite strangers’ cu
rious looks. Their dread of my making a scene explains why I am alone, in the back seat. Listening. What I’ve done, moving in with my boyfriend—it’s wrong. I am disgracing the name Tallent. I have a choice: either I move back into the house with the other girls, which they are after all paying for, or my mother and father want nothing more to do with me. Through a sear of incredulity I hear the words coming out of my mouth: Then maybe it’s time I was on my own. One of them might glance back, trying to guess how likely I am to stick to my guns, whether doubt or remorse figure in my expression, which might imply I can be persuaded from my resistance back into the fold, not that it’s ever been a fold but one of them might need to turn to look before the break is declared final, but my father has to keep both hands on the wheel, which leaves only my mother, every cell in my body summons that turn of her head, and when it doesn’t materialize, when I’m not looked back at, I feel a slippage, a rupture. There’s a lot of fury in that car, but it has a floating irrelevance: no one lays claim to it. So is this how such things happen. My father could have driven us out of town into the country, whose winter-dismal fields and far horizons would not have offended our despair. I regret—I’m guessing we all regret—his having chosen instead the darkening downtown, and then, once the danger of our getting complicatedly lost emerges, picking a random block to drive around, right turn after right turn after right turn. When he slows for one such turn, I half fear he’s going to ask me to get out. Maybe I half hope he will, as the theatrical culmination of their—their what, their disowning me. What else is We want no more to do with you? I could have stood on the wintry corner in my thrift shop overcoat, in bell-bottoms whose hems tent out to hide my ballet slippers, and wept. Tears could have run down my face, I could have licked them from the corners of my mouth and wiped my runny nose on the sleeve of my overcoat, overdramatizing like crazy, and it would have been better, far, than having to sit thus, politely cast out, in their back seat, suffering through this prolongation of their refusal to look back. My wounded disbelief insults them, as yet another failure to take them seriously, to honor their convictions, my simply being still there in the back seat forces them to feel my unwillingness to take back a word I’ve said, this is taking forever, how long can anyone stay lost in such a small town, I call out a turn when I recognize it, but mostly I’m lost, too, and when we discover the street leading to the sorority sisters’ place, our shameful destination, we probably think separate versions of Thank Christ—theirs would not be profane—but now we’re here, look at me, I’m going to have to open the car door and step out and come up with the last words I’m ever going to say to my mother and father, and how can I do that, what are those words? I get out. Nothing comes. I close the door.

  Disgrace—the word caught me off guard. Still, from their perspective, as I even then understood, the betrayal was mine. Suppose I honored them as a daughter is supposed to: I would respect their wishes for my virtue, and other, unvoiced wishes I was only guessing at, wishes that had to do with social respectability, with class, intimations that a roofer boyfriend was not the partner my quasi-promising future required. That he loves me with steady incandescence, that he never tires of me—the saving grace of him, even if I could explain it, which I can’t, was bound to appear insignificant when held up against their conviction of having been wronged. Disgrace—their relying on the coerciveness of the construct both pisses me off and scares me on their behalf, it shows so little grasp of the way people—the way I—work. And if they didn’t know that, if they couldn’t anticipate the resistance their threat was bound to excite, then what could they be said to understand at all? That might have been our crime: barely knowing each other. But it’s not a crime you can convincingly accuse anyone in your family of.

  Nineteen: now the only income we have is the money he makes working on roofs. As far as family I’m down to him. Though a lone B+ can prove fatal to the grad-school application I’ve started daydreaming about, my grades falter, in seminars my inattention is chided, certain mornings I fail to get out of bed. Let’s go for a drive, he says, and we learn the countryside for hundreds of prairie miles in every direction from Normal. I like sitting with my knees bent, the toes of my ballet slippers on the dash, his eyes on the road, at peace, the two of us, absorbed, the two of us, by what we’re doing, though driving doesn’t feel like doing exactly, more like being caught up in, how sex can feel when you pass a certain point, and though as the passenger I’m making no effort to do anything and neither can he as the driver be said to be exerting himself, whenever we are driving we have the conviction that the two of us are making something, what binds us is the conviction not only of making but also of some necessary burning away, of peeling down to who we are at our deepest, his cigarette-holding hand steadying the wheel, and for me being alongside him feels like being alive to the exact degree he is, there’s something bold and gainful about simply facing the way he faces. “It is the space between inner and outer world, which is also the space between people—the transitional space—that intimate relationships and creativity occur,” writes D. W. Winnicott.

  Twenty: because skipping my last semester of senior year will save on tuition, because whether he’s ready to leave his hometown or not I’m desperate to get out, I apply early to graduate school. To several schools, but only one matters. A single program controls the territory where I want to work. In the high desert of the Four Corners, directorship of archaeological digs is assigned exclusively to their graduates—to those exalted beings with PhDs from the University of New Mexico.

  The evening after I mail off the application, I ask him whether he will come with me if I do get in, and when he doesn’t immediately answer I say So you’d break up with me? He says It’ll be you who packs and leaves. I say You’ve got your degree, too, what’s keeping you here?—completely unfair, since I know very well how hurtful it would be for him to tear himself away. He says we’re going to need to talk more. To my disbelief he seems to regard graduate school as another, longer archaeological dig I’m going on, during which he would continue working as a roofer, writing letters, driving cross-country to see me. I want him to regard separation as a calamity. I want possessiveness from him, jealousy too intense to risk my being out of sight. His good-son trip is less charming, now that it threatens to lock him in Normal. His needing time, his wanting to talk trouble me. You have to tell me now, I say evilly, and he says Let’s go for a drive, want to?

  You have to tell me.

  Why, when it’s going to be weeks before you hear?

  Because I can’t sleep, not knowing how this’s going to go.

  You slept fine last night, he points out.

  I would spend more time scared of losing him, but I mostly don’t believe this slim hope of grad school has the least chance of coming true.

  But it does, and amazement at my having gotten in—been accepted—erases the ambivalence that haunted the process of applying. My undergrad adviser was a revered Texas archaeologist known for his pranks and bestowal of nicknames, and when he first casually called me Clementine, my thought was not Why Clementine? but Coulda been worse. Clementine was lost and gone forever, exactly what I wanted to be in relation to everyone in the Midwest. According to my adviser the University of New Mexico’s archaeology program was harder to get into than Harvard Law, and I ought to hallelujah myself hoarse, the more so since my grades could kindly be called lackluster. He had saved my bacon with the most righteous letter of recommendation in the history of letters of recommendation.