by Karen Brown
Darla isn’t an exception. She has been coming here for two years. Her blond hair flips out at her shoulders, 1960s-style. Freckles sprinkle her narrow, upturned nose. She carries herself with a dancer’s torso, and I am almost certain she came from a family that taught her to smile at cashiers and cabdrivers, and say “Yes, Ma’am” to anyone older, regardless of class. She wears expensive jeans and flimsy halter tops and looks like she has a regular job, which I know she does not. She lives off the child support provided by her ex, the clothes leftovers from her life before. She has two children, little girls whose fine, white-blond hair she must have had as a child. I have seen the photos she pulls out late at night, when they are supposedly with their father, and she is particularly unhappy with her life.
Sometimes during closing, I am the only one in the bar to show them to, and I try not to reveal to her the wrenching feeling I get looking, or how the photographs of her daughters chart for me the passing of unredeemable time. Other nights, a crowd will gather, kindly and respectful. “This one’s Ada,” she’ll say, pointing her manicured finger. “And this is Lenore.” At two a.m., no one can see the images too clearly. But the women will make their cooing noises, sigh, and remark on the girls’ beauty, and one of the men will say Darla looks too young to have two children, and another will mention how much they resemble her, to which she will give a watery-eyed smile. “Don’t they?” she’ll say. She’ll fasten her look on the man, and he will know he has scored a point with her, that maybe, since the kids aren’t there, she will take him home with her. I am a little saddened that most kindnesses in a bar are calculated, that everything that happens here blooms from the alcohol. There aren’t any sudden and unplanned instances of love.
Dr. Chambley is friendly to Darla but he keeps his distance, which surprises me sometimes, because I know his type. I often point out women he might love, and he tries to pick them up. We do not pretend to only want each other, but I choose the women halfheartedly, and when he is successful I feel a vague unease. I find someone from the bar for myself, though I still do not know if he recognizes this as retaliation. One Friday night, after Darla had left and we were ready to close up, I asked him why he didn’t go for her.
“Why should I?” he asked me back. He was zipping up the money pouch, a little unsteady on his feet. “She’s trouble.” He looked me right in the eye, the way he does before he plans to kiss me or take a splinter of glass from my finger.
I stepped back. “She’s just like everyone else,” I said, though as I said it I realized it wasn’t true. The room was smoky, the door was open, and I wanted to get near the air. He took my arm then and turned me around. He gave me the look, wary and serious, of someone considering my best interests. He had lined the empty bottles up on the top of the bar, and turned off the lights and left one of the air conditioners running. Dr. Chambley is annoyingly meticulous at times. He has to follow the same patterns every night, counting the drawer two, sometimes three times, checking the door twice before he walks away. I am never sure if I should trust his advice, knowing these weaknesses. He still has a wife and three grown children and a membership to the country club. He lives four blocks away in one of the renovated bungalows. He was undeserving of his wife’s love, he once said. We were in bed in my apartment at the time, on one of the first occasions we’d slept together. He told me my set of rooms was once part of a stucco villa that belonged to the man who brought the Pepsi franchise to the city. The room was dark, and the streetlight came in through the old casement window glass, and the air conditioner hummed from the other room.
“Whose love do you deserve?” I asked him. I slid my body over his, pressed my forehead to his chest.
He laughed. “No one’s.”
“Why is that, do you think?”
He sighed. “Don’t try to figure yourself out with my story. Go to sleep now.” But his presumption angered me. I grabbed my clothes and slammed the apartment door and dressed on the stair landing, in the light of a weak, yellow bulb and the neighbor’s cooking smells. I went down the stairs and out into the courtyard and knew that up in the room he was still in my bed, expecting me to come back, that at that moment I might choose to return to the room and tell him my story, listen to myself telling it and understand, finally, what I ever meant by my leaving, feel his mouth on mine afterward like forgiveness. But I did not, and then he came down the stairs and got into his car and left, and I missed, instantly, the softness of the bed, the weight of him balancing the mattress. I missed the smell of his fingers, like limes, the way they smoothed the hair from my forehead. You can miss anything, I saw. It didn’t mean it made you happy.
That night after I mentioned Darla, Dr. Chambley and I stood together in the parking lot. He did not offer me a ride home, which meant that he did not want to sleep with me. It was summer, and the air was heavy. Thunder rumbled, distant and almost comforting. My apartment was only a block away, close enough for me to walk. I did not usually drive to work. Dr. Chambley always drove the four blocks back and forth to his house in an old Stingray convertible he bought after he sold his practice. On the nights I had someone waiting for me, Dr. Chambley would walk purposefully to his car, preoccupied with his keys, and he did that now, though there was no one waiting. I wished there was someone to lure into my life, to take home and wonder what he thought of me, watch his face during sex with the detachment you get watching an accident happen to someone else. The crumbled shells of the parking lot shone white and bleached in the streetlight. I dreaded the walk home, abandoned to the night’s looming rain, the interminable sound of the sculpture’s keys marking the empty place Dr. Chambley made when he chose not to be with me.
———
A few nights later, Darla came in early, at five o’clock. I felt the afternoon heat come through the door with her, smelled it clinging to her bare arms and shoulders, heady as her Guerlain. She had already been drinking. I smelled that on her, too. She put her arms around me and hugged me hello. She wore her hair plaited in two small braids. I imagined the little girls at home with their plates of SpaghettiOs and bread and butter, sitting in front of the television alone. She would have given them their bath and patted them each with powder. The evening news was on the TV over the bar. Darla lit up one of her long, thin cigarettes. She offered me one, and I took it, and as she leaned in with her lighter I saw her eyes well up, and as she sat back I saw she had begun to cry.
“Beau’s trying to take the girls away,” she said. She wiped under each eye with a finger to stop her mascara from running.
Beau was Darla’s husband. We had never talked about him before. I just remembered the name from times she had used it in passing. “Beau took the girls to Sanibel,” she’d said. “Beau’s mother is getting the girls’ ears pierced today,” she told us all once with a wounded pout. “Don’t you think that’s my department?”
Tonight, I made Darla her old-fashioned and brought it over to where her cigarette burned in the ashtray, and she sat with her face in her hands. I touched one of the braids with my fingers. I knew I wouldn’t have to say anything, that I could just listen to her while she had her drink, and the place would fill, and someone else would appear to tell the story to, and I would overhear it told two or three, maybe four times before she left, each telling revealing the variety of ways in which she is taken advantage. The regular patrons would all offer their advice, and some of it would be good, and some wouldn’t, but none of it would matter. Darla, I assumed, would end up doing nothing, and her life would simply happen to her. Sometimes, I know, this comes as a relief, this resignation, this kind of surrender.
Years ago, I took the walking tour of the town where my husband and I bought our house. He had grown up there, and I knew no one, and he was often away on business. I was visibly pregnant, and the guide, a retired man, kept glancing back at me with a nervous smile. Our small group made its way down Pratt Street in the new spring light, beside the patches of bright grass, beneath the wheeling of gulls, and
he told us the story of the old ropewalk. It was eight hundred feet long, he said, raising his arms to show the span, a low wooden shed with small windows. Inside, the workers made rope by hand, twisting the hemp into heavy hawsers, into bell ropes and string used for kites, the room alive with ropes spun from the great wheel. They made the rope for ships in fathom lengths, drawing it through the doorway and out into the street. The guide recited Longfellow, “Human spiders spin and spin, Backward down their threads so thin,” and I remember his voice, how the sun was warm on my head and shoulders, the way the wind sounded in the elm leaves. We paused at my husband’s family’s house, and the guide pointed out its handsome federal style, its roof’s shallow pitch, its double chimneys, its original owner, who ran the block and spar business. I stood outside of the house on the sidewalk with the others, marveling. In the end, I would not choose that life, its wealth and history like a closed wheel, but standing there at the time, I did not know it yet. I felt only a small swell of uncertainty, the baby’s kick, my heart’s quickening. In the Tap Tavern, my hair full of smoke, and my hands smelling of spilled bourbon, I knew that the ropes were like lives stretched out infinitely into the sunlight, that it didn’t matter which life you picked. The one you didn’t was yours anyway, drawn out alongside the one you lived like a possibility.
“He says I’m incompetent,” Darla whispered. She gave me a wide-eyed look and bit into a piece of ice. “He thinks I’m neglecting them.”
We both knew she was neglecting them, but we maintained the pretense that she was not, that her love for them canceled out all irresponsible actions on her part. I put on my shocked expression. I lit another cigarette. And the place filled up, and I became too busy to placate her. Dr. Chambley came in later, and she was still at the bar, and he sensed her story in the air, like the fine, silver tension before a fight. He cornered me at the back of the bar and asked me what was happening. His eyes glittered in the light from the beer sign. He wanted the satisfaction of seeing a prediction fulfilled, and I did not want to hand it over to him. But I knew he would find out from someone, and so I told him.
He watched my face with his penetrating look. Most of the time, I loved this about him. “And what will she do?” he asked me.
I shrugged. “She didn’t say.”
“Because,” he said, “she doesn’t have a leg to stand on.”
We had never disagreed about anyone in the bar before. It was never an issue to care about them too much. When her husband sent in someone the following night to inquire about her visits to the bar, I avoided him. I did not want to tell the truth, but Dr. Chambley was there, listening, and there were other regulars the man talked to, and it wouldn’t have helped for me to lie. The man fit in, and had seemed like a new patron at first. He wore a seersucker sport coat. His hair was thinning, and he kept flattening it with his hand. His nose was large and he was perspiring. I thought he was a drunk, a salesman, a traveler. We get those, occasionally, as if there is some kind of beacon on the place. He gave me a sad, conciliatory smile, and leaned on the bar’s surface, his coat sleeve sopping up the condensation from his beer.
“She pretty wasted when she leaves?” he asked.
His upper lip shone. His eyes moved, for a moment, toward the V of my blouse. I glared at him and did not speak. He waited until my silence forced him to turn away. Later, Dr. Chambley pulled him aside and they talked for a long while sitting at the corner of the bar. I shoved the bottles into the well with unnecessary force. Two glasses slipped from my hands and shattered in the metal sink. I went up to a man at the bar, a regular customer with long hair pulled back, and round framed glasses. He’d been trying to take me home for weeks, and I’d always resisted. Tonight, I leaned over and kissed him on the mouth and tasted the drink I’d made him. At closing, Dr. Chambley confronted me, holding my hand in his two palms.
We stood in the dark bar and the man waited for me outside in a Riviera, and I wanted to taste the drink on his mouth again, feel the car’s vinyl seats, his hands search beneath the fabric of my blouse, under the hem of my skirt. I could take him home and watch to see if he looked at my books on the shelf, if he commented on the absence of photographs, on the bare and simple way in which I lived. Or, we could do what we needed to in the car, right there in the parking lot. Afterward, I would have him drop me off, and I could pass through the courtyard and listen to the old fountain, see the basin of rusted pennies in the moonlight, smell the gardenias, listen to the keys of the sculpture, their sound a mournful reminder of the life that I was missing. Sometimes, I wallowed in it like the sadness of a mistake.
Dr. Chambley gave me his inquisitive look. “What’s this Darla business got to do with you?” he asked.
“Nothing at all,” I said. Dr. Chambley watched me. He didn’t make a move to leave. I saw him lick his lips and glance away, befuddled for once. I had to tell him I had someone waiting in the parking lot. He still looked, hoping for some revelation.
“Do you know what I really want?” he asked. He made a careful business of folding up his shirtsleeves. He breathed in and out, emphatically. “Some honesty, for once.” His eyes were worn and dismayed. We went out the door and he went back and checked the handle, twice, and got into his Stingray. He didn’t give me a backward glance. I was left with the taillights of the Riviera, its chugging engine, its foul exhaust spilling out, my own regret at what I might always fail to give him.
———
Two weeks later Darla came in at nine o’clock, towing her girls. They wore matching nightgowns, long ones that came to their shins, made from batiste. They followed their mother, the oldest shy yet alert, the youngest one half-asleep, her eyes lit with fear. Darla came up to me at the bar and gripped my forearm.
“Please,” she said. Her lined eyes were wide, the mascara smeared a little under each. The bourbon smell came through her skin’s pores. The little girls climbed up on two empty stools. I saw their small faces framed by their whitish hair. I noticed their hands on the bar, the little fingernails, painted pink. I smelled their apple shampoo. The older one, Ada, was seven. Lenore was five. They both looked at me, curious, expectant, their eyes replicas of their mother’s, blue-green, like something sea-washed and soft. Dr. Chambley had not come in. He sometimes didn’t until eleven or twelve, and Darla knew this.
“Let them stay,” she said. “Their father is coming to take them away, and I can’t leave them at home.” She said this last part leaning in, as if to prevent the girls from hearing, but she did not lower her voice, and I saw they heard and already knew what was happening. They lived in a small rented house I had seen the few times Dr. Chambley and I dropped Darla off after closing. I had thought about the girls in there alone, what they would wake to in the morning, with Darla stumbling in, sometimes passing out right there in the living room on the couch, or the rug. I thought, too, about how I had served her the drinks and I felt a small tug of complicity. But now, with the girls in front of me, their breath and skin, their sheer nightgowns, their little feet shod in flip-flops tucked on the top rung of each barstool, I felt my chest constrict.
The older one, Ada, asked me for a Coke. I was surprised that she asked, but then I understood she was asserting herself with me, showing me she was grown up, that she was the one who woke her mother, and got her out of her soiled clothes, and made meals, and handled everything at home, and so I gave it to her, without a word. The youngest was silent, still frightened and somewhat pale.
“Would you like anything?” I asked her. The bar was almost full, noisy with the games of pool and darts. The air conditioners were on, but it was still smoky, and I saw her eyes begin to water.
“She’ll have a Sprite,” Ada said. Lenore nodded, and Ada placed her hand over her sister’s on the bar.
Darla, distracted, glanced around the room, looking for a regular to confide in, to seek advice, to find some kind of aid. She lit a cigarette. She met my gaze and her eyes asked me for a drink, and apologized at the same time. Darla was
beautiful with a hopeless and shining desperation. She sighed. She looked at my shoes, the Prada pumps that won Dr. Chambley. “I like those,” she said, wistfully. She blew smoke out of her nose. Her lips were thin and dry. She looked at her two girls with a love so resigned I had to look away.
My husband bought the Prada pumps at Neiman’s. They were a gift at the end of my pregnancy. The salesclerk had raised her eyebrows at the stiletto heels. The department store had been overbright and sterile, filled with the smell of new carpeting and spray samples of perfume from the nearby fragrance counter. “For after,” my husband said, grinning, his tie loosened, his throat pale and vulnerable under his collar. The idea of the places I would have to wear them, how I would wear them to please him, overwhelmed me. I realized I had not thought beyond the pregnancy, that I could not bear to live the life he had planned for me. I did not want him anymore. It was a simple thing to recognize, this lost love, as if it had slipped underneath some hidden layer of my life and I could not find it. And still his love persisted. I was pinioned by it, bound and helpless under the department store’s fluorescent lighting.
In the Tap Tavern, Darla sipped from her drink. She picked it up and set it back down with a shaky, slender hand. Ada watched her, and then glared at me for a long time, and I saw she blamed me. She was a little girl, but her eyes were wise and sad, and I knew then that maybe a life with their father would be better for them, but it would never replace the one they would live with Darla, her attention, her lovely hands in their hair, her fearful eyes on them, needy for their honest professions of love.
Darla sat at the bar and cried. The girls were used to her crying, and they seemed almost disinterested, preoccupied with the stirrers in their glasses.
