by Karen Brown
She decided to drive to her father’s. He lived in the house she grew up in, an older farmhouse set back from the narrow road, with a screened-in front porch and two gables and beds full of flowers—daisy and black-eyed Susan, delphinium and larkspur. Around the side of the house grew hydrangea, heavy with blooms. The country club had purchased the back pastures years ago and tamed and groomed the wild grass into golf course greens. The barn had burned the year after Nan’s mother died. It was a relic of the days when the farm was operating, a high, empty space filled with molding hay, and the fire was cited as accidental, unknown teenagers playing with matches. But after the fire her father gave up hope. It happened quickly, a kind of deflating. His face sagged around his cheeks. His eyes dulled. Most people said it had to do with the inexplicable nature of events, one after the other, but Nan always believed her father thought she had burned down the barn. Her tires crunched the gravel drive, past the orchard, the trees gnarled and old. Her father came right away at her knock and let her in, propping the screen door with a look of genuine surprise.
“You’re here,” he said.
He held her in a stiff embrace. His shirtfront smelled the same, like loam and soap flakes.
“Where’s the boy?” he asked, stepping back. She saw his face brighten.
“Asleep still, in the car,” she said.
Her father bounded down the steps and across the yard. Nan watched him extricate Clemmy from his car seat and carry him, still groggy, up onto the porch. Her father set him on his feet in the kitchen, and Nan saw that Clemmy had wet his pants. The front of her father’s shirt was dampened from carrying him. “A little accident, I see,” her father said. He knelt by Clemmy, grinning, his sharp chin jutting out.
“We’re still working on that,” Nan said. Her son’s hair was rumpled from the long drive. He was small for his age, but sturdy and smart. He had been potty-trained at two and a half, and this was new, one of a number of reversions that she witnessed with a sinking sense of irreversibility, as if they would accumulate until he had returned to his infancy, a time she found herself the most incompetent. Nan opened Clemmy’s bag and pulled out some dry clothes to change him, and then her father offered to do it, and Nan gratefully sank down into her old spot at the pine table in the kitchen. She could hear her father and Clemmy in the bathroom, her father’s boisterous encouragements, and Clemmy’s soft and higher-pitched replies. After, Clemmy colored at the table, and her father stood at the counter and made him a sandwich. He set out the old plaid beanbag ashtray, and she told him she had quit. “I’m impressed,” he said. His face beamed. Perhaps he was, she thought. This was all it took. She assumed he would not mention her husband, who had met another woman and asked for the divorce, but then he did, anyway.
“Richard stopped in last week,” he said.
Nan said nothing, and her father turned back to the counter.
“Well, he was in town,” he said carefully.
“What for?” Nan asked, her voice a little shrill.
Her father put his hand on the refrigerator handle.
“We went fishing,” he said. “Like we always do.”
The air in the kitchen was heavy, laden with the smell of that morning’s cooked bacon. The windows were open, and her mother’s lace curtains puffed out into the room and then pulled back against the old screens. The sills were filled with the dry wings of bees. Flies landed on the tabletop and the old aqua Formica counter. There was the cracked porcelain sugar bowl with its glued lid. On one end of the long table where her father’s chair was pushed back, a game of solitaire spread like a map of his loneliness. He offered her a sandwich or something to drink, but she refused. He stood there, unable to find anything to do or say.
“Will you stay the night?” he asked her. Clemmy pulled apart his sandwich and poked at the peanut butter with his finger. Nan said she might, that she would take their things upstairs, and she rose from the table and went up to her old room. She sat on the edge of the bed and tried to remember someone she might call, but she could not. She stared at her little bookshelf lined with Nancy Drews, all in numerical order, their yellow spines faded. The room was still decorated the way her mother had planned it, with porcelain cats and white painted furniture, a room for a twelve-year-old girl. From the window she saw her father outside with Clemmy, busying himself in the flower beds. He had given the boy a watering can and she watched him fill it from the hose. Nan unpacked Clemmy’s things. She pulled open the bureau drawers and placed the folded clothes inside, on top of the curling shelf paper. Her sisters would be around soon enough to discover her. There would be Rose’s calm gaze and her crossed arms, May’s endless questions. They would arrive with their own children, suntanned and noisy and barefoot, to swim in the pool her father had put in out back—an aboveground structure that resembled a barrel.
Nan went out onto the porch and asked her father if he would watch Clemmy while she drove into town for something at the store.
“What do you need?” he asked her. He stood among the phlox. She found him changed—his eyes searching, difficult to face. “I might have it.”
Nan shrugged. “I feel like a drive,” she said.
His shoulders fell, resigned. He nodded. She watched him take Clemmy by the hand and wave as she backed out of the driveway. Clemmy’s small hand flipped brightly in imitation of his grandfather.
She drove down Tunxis Avenue with no place to go. The row of shaggy hickories shadowing the road parted, and Junior’s was there, the first garage before Filley Pond and the center of town. She remembered when she and Matt Olander would stop in to visit Junior, usually on a Saturday night before they went out. Matt would have beer in a cooler, and she would follow him through the wooden door with its jangling bell, into the garage’s sticky heat. Junior and Matt would chain-smoke and drink. Nan would sit, ignored, on a swivel chair with a ripped vinyl cushion. She’d worn pale-colored summer clothes and worried about getting grease on them. Her mother had been dead for nearly two years. She was in high school, and Matt was the first boy she slept with.
Now, Junior stands amidst the cicada noise in the late summer haze. Nan drops down onto the front seat of a car that is only a rusted frame. She tucks her silk skirt under her legs. The upholstery is sun-faded and its stuffing comes out in tufts. She imagines the seat is a bed for mice. She is light-headed, her limbs loose. Earlier, inside the garage, he offered her a beer, and she took it, and then another, and perhaps another after that. She doesn’t remember. She found the same torn vinyl swivel chair and that prompted her to talk about the past, recounting the stories she overheard Matt and Junior tell twenty years before, when all of their friends could be identified by the cars they worshipped and drove in rings around town or raced between the tobacco tents on Dudley Town Road. She did not tell him how she knew the stories or who she was. Junior didn’t ask. He leaned up against an old Chevy truck and listened, every so often tossing his hair back or smiling, but saying nothing. Somehow, she revealed to him that she’d had sex in most of her boyfriends’ cars, and he tipped his chin up at that and laughed out loud. He said he saw to it that most of his friends’ cars ended up in his back lot, and that took them out the wooden door with its tinkling bell, around the side of the garage on a dirt path under the elms.
Junior pulls a beer from the back pocket of his baggy jeans. He takes a long sip and brings it over to Nan. She crosses her legs and kicks her sandaled foot. Her feet are dusty, she notices. She takes the beer, still cool from the garage refrigerator, and drinks.
“Most of them are dead,” she says now. She says it lightly, carelessly.
Junior doesn’t ask for the beer back. He lights another cigarette and watches her drink, his dark eyes like black pools. “Which ones?” he asks.
Nan remembers that Junior’s reticence is not from shyness. It is purposeful, premeditated. In her memory he is back against a wall or leaning up against a car or a doorframe. There are groups of boys and girls, all paired up, teasin
g and playful, the boys’ hands free, the girls leaning in with their mouths. Junior never had a girlfriend, she recalls. He watched them all from under his hair and made his occasional dry comments. A lean, lonely man, wreathed in his silence. She thinks for a moment.
“Stevie Ash,” she says. “With the chain-saw scar from here to here.” She points with her index finger from her neck, down across her chest.
Junior nods and exhales. “His family cut trees for firewood.”
Nan remembers Stevie telling her the story, how the chain broke and flew up, a slick, clean swipe he didn’t feel at first. It was a fall day, he said, and the wet leaves on the ground were splattered with what he realized was his own blood. The chain missed the carotid artery and he lived, but only a handful of years before his car rolled and rolled, broke the guardrail, and fell from the Tariffville Bridge.
“A Barracuda,” she says. Silvery blue, like the real fish.
Junior motions for her to follow him, and he finds the car in the shade near the back of the lot, most of its paint seared off. Moths flutter up and around the lower tree branches.
“We would drive up to Highland Lake and park,” she says. She remembers the brownish mud shore and the shine of the water on the dashboard. She’d slid her mouth along his scar, down to his waist. “Don’t you want to see how far it goes?” he’d asked. Her pearl-colored fingernails played with the clasp to his pants. Sometimes families drove by and saw, but he would have his hands in her hair and say it didn’t matter. He had blond, soft curls she tried now, looking at the car’s charred body, not to imagine up in flames.
“That was in June ’79,” Junior says. He puts his foot up on the car’s rusty bumper and it falls into the grass with a splintery crunch. He gives her a slit-eyed, assessing look, as if he is trying to place her.
“What?” Nan asks, and tips the beer back and finishes it. Junior doesn’t seem to mind. He moves along again, down the rows of cars, and stops.
“And this one,” he says. He looks up, expecting she has followed him, but she has not. “Another of your beaus?” He says the word with a lilting, sarcastic edge. Nan does not want to acknowledge if it is or isn’t. The sun slips behind clouds.
“Broder’s Nova,” he says.
John Broder, she thinks, who once held her down on the carpet in his father’s apartment when she had been too drunk on blackberry brandy to protest. He died, like his father, of a bullet to the brain. He parked the Nova behind the old Grand Union. It was summer and two days before they found him, the car humming with flies. From her distance, Nan can see the car, not so deteriorated, its paint simply faded. Perhaps the inside is messy and hard to look at. Nan stays where she is. Junior watches her from behind his stringy hair.
“There’s more,” he says, like a game show emcee. She thinks she hears laughter in his voice.
Nan tries to smile. “I’ll bet,” she says. She holds the empty bottle out and Junior comes over to her and takes it from her hand. His boots flatten the dry grass. Small gnats flit around their ankles. It is late afternoon. Maybe early evening, she does not know. Through the ring of elms is someone’s backyard, and she smells the burning of charcoal briquettes, hears children splashing in a pool. She imagines Clemmy with his cousins in her father’s yard. They gather cut grass and arrange it in circles to make nests. They outline paths from one nest to the other, a whole interconnecting world made of her father’s grass. She doesn’t know how Clemmy will be with them, if he will play, like the other children, or sit quietly, morose, waiting for her to return. She asks Junior if she may use the restroom, and he leads her back into the garage to a small door. In the bathroom is a weak bulb with a dangling cord that Junior reaches past her to pull. Nan steps inside and closes the door. The plumbing is rusted, the toilet without a seat. She hovers over the bowl to relieve herself, gripping the rim. She rinses her hands in a grimy sink. There is no mirror for Nan to see what she looks like, but she feels her flushed cheeks, her hair flattened and damp. She remembers when, as a teenager, she experienced this same rushing feeling, as if each moment precipitated some culminating event.
When she emerges, Junior is waiting in front of the door. Beyond him the afternoon light shifts in waving patterns around the trunks of the elms. She and Junior look at each other. Nan wants to ask him what good it is to keep the cars here. But then he reaches out and takes her hand in his. It is warm and chalky, and surprisingly strong. He pulls her outside, along the first row to a Firebird convertible—the canvas top folded down, the seats in fairly good shape. Junior opens the passenger door and she hesitates.
“You’ve never done it in this one,” he says. His voice is low and laughing.
Nan sits down on the seat and pulls her legs up to avoid the mildewed floorboard carpet. Junior leaves the door open and goes back to the garage. He returns with more beer in its cardboard holder and sets it on the console between the bucket seats. He climbs into the driver’s side and pushes in the car’s lighter. It pops out, glowing, and he lights his cigarette. The radio works, too, and he ejects an old eight-track tape from the player—Canned Heat—and holds it up for her to see, grinning. Nan can’t imagine what she is doing there. She thinks that now, at her father’s house, the children are organizing games of freeze tag or Mother-May-I? on the front lawn. Her father and sisters sit around their kitchen table, wondering what has become of her. Rose tapping her cigarette ash into the beanbag ashtray, assuring her father that Nan has gone to the mall in Farmington or to an old friend’s. May more uncertain, declaring Nan knows no one in town anymore. The talk will shift to the trouble Nan had always gotten into, the way she left home, the barn. She imagines her sisters sharing a secret look.
Nan thinks she will stay with Junior as long as he will let her. It will grow dark, the fireflies emerging like burning batting, the stars bedding down overhead. They’ll listen to the frogs in Filley Pond, a rolling sound, like a die in a tumbler. He might put his arm around her, and she will lean into his chest, into the smell of his T-shirt—a scent she identifies with the boys of her youth, mechanic’s grease and sweat and cheap cologne. Junior tries to play the tape, but it only works for a few minutes before it becomes garbled and breaks in the player. The sun sets with a vivid spray behind the trees, and they drink the beer.
“I’ve been working on this one,” Junior tells her. He runs his fingers around the steering wheel.
“Why this one?” Nan asks.
“It’s a good year,” he says. “A ’76.”
Nan shrugs. She stares through the windshield as if they are heading somewhere.
“A lot happened that year,” Junior says. He makes a humming noise under his breath. He leans against the driver’s-side door and looks over at her. His face is lined, she sees. Years have passed since he was a teenager. “Do you remember when the old Henley barn burned? Wasn’t that in ’76?” The cicadas whine, long and high-pitched. Nan sighs.
“Do you know the story of the barn?” she asks.
“I think I’ve heard it,” he says. The smoke from his cigarette spirals in the twilight.
Nan didn’t think anyone else knew the story. But of course, Matt was Junior’s friend, and he had told him. And who else, she wonders. Most likely everyone, she realizes. She had been foolish, assuming boys would care for her and keep her secrets. As if sex were a pact, a sealed envelope. She and Matt had lain in the moldy straw, and she had seen bats dart in and out of the eaves on their leathery wings. She had taken Matt’s lighter from his jeans pocket to light her cigarette, and it had burned her thumb, and she dropped it. Matt scooped it up, but not before the flame caught. They got out, stumbling, laughing, in awe of the blaze, running back through the field to the safety of the tall pinewoods. Pieces of ash floated down around them. She watched the fire department put it out and imagined her sisters gathering with her father, her absence felt. Rose said their father cried with his face in his hands. May said they all cried, each hiding it from the other.
Nan had though
t the fire beautiful. She watched with Matt, her mouth sore and reddened, her shirt open and her hair singed. Once, she told him, they had a swing from the rafters, and their mother would push them. They stored the apple crates in the barn, and the ladders the hired men used to harvest the orchard. Back then, the hay was freshly mown and sold to local farmers, the bales of it stacked in sweet-smelling corded piles. Nan loved the barn with a childish, whimsical heart. But she knew it was all gone long before it burned. She had given up listening for her mother’s footsteps on the landing outside her bedroom. She stopped believing she might catch sight of her at the kitchen counter. How silly, she thinks now, to imagine there might have been some mistake. Her mother died in a hospital, under a light the color of yellowed Scotch tape. Nan was there to see her mother’s pale face slacken, her lips drop open. She watched her father pack her mother’s nightgowns in a suitcase and take them home.
“Story goes you were great in the hay, but careless with the lighter,” Junior says.
She nods thoughtfully. She never understood, until now, Matt’s honest refusal to say he loved her.
“You remember me,” she says. She pulls on the rearview mirror and looks at herself. “I’m the age of my mother when she died.”
But she looks nothing like that face on the hospital pillow. She has her father’s features—sharp nose and chin, confused, searching eyes. Now, in her childhood bedroom, Clemmy will be put to bed with her father’s dry kiss on his forehead. The cut grass smell clings to his damp skin. The beetles beat at the metal screen. The light is soft and precious. Nan knows that warm lurch of lucky love. She cannot understand why it has never been good enough. Junior reaches out and puts a hand on her ankle. She feels his fingers encircle it, closes her eyes and hears the car upholstery crunch, feels his breath on her cheek as he leans in. This is how it was with boys. She tasted the beer on their lips, the aftershave on their roughened necks. There were others she’d been with who died, tragically, before their time. Paul Gerardi, of a long illness unnamed in the newspaper. They slept in the blue television glow of his basement room, while outside snow fell and buried her car. He hid her keys so she wouldn’t leave, or spiked her drink with Demerol. Joseph Reynolds fell from the bow of his boat; his body tangled in the seaweed off Block Island. His hands were always busy, his voice cajoling. She let him carve his initials with his penknife on her shoulder.
