Highway Trade and Other Stories

by John Domini

  Still it looks as if Lilah and Valerie spotted me. In fact it shakes me, how quick they cut round behind one of the racks.

  It always shakes me to see women like that do something hustly. They’re both so rangy and correct, former sorority queens. Also they haven’t even had a minute to stop home and change. Where did this rule get started, that if a family makes enough money it’s the women’s job to pick up the flicks for the weekend? Josh says it’s another ripple effect, like the way fashions come up the coast from L.A.. Except in this case the ripple’s just getting started. The Western managerial class is barely off the farm. Forget about Dallas, forget about DeLorean—I swear this speech is like some kind of ritual dance, for Josh. The culture’s projecting way ahead there, and you notice DeLorean wound up getting his ass torched anyway.

  Thinking of his talk, I’m frowning. I crane up on my toes to track the women from mirror to mirror, I cock my hands against the rippling hive of weekend girls.

  “Mrs. um, Boweroff? Should we hit the alarm?”

  “No no, don’t panic. I know what I’m doing, don’t panic.”

  Julie. I would have known her from her voice if it hadn’t been a coupon night. And flumping onto my heels again, more aggravation. How am I supposed to be angry at Julie? Julie’s the one girl here that doesn’t fit in. Always the stray bangs in her eyes, when you shouldn’t even wear bangs with hair so fiery, so rich. Always the uneasy zigzag posture, as if she were trying to scrunch down into something like my own curly shape. She’s the one girl here who was obviously raised on a ranch.

  The way I deal with it for the moment is to ask for her returns, a double-armload, and duck into the back to do a nice slow job of re-shelving. The soundtrack’s muted, back there. Between the high, subdivided stacks there’s no color, only the fluorescents overhead. But Julie returns before I’ve reached Night of the Living Dead. She’s empty-handed, and God that ranchy awkwardness is easy to read. Don’t tell me. There are two friends of mine out front who need some help.

  “Um, they say they don’t know about some of the choices.”

  “Oh God. Hasn’t anyone else in this town ever seen a foreign film?”

  Her chin drops. What am I doing, trying to impress sixteen-year-olds now?

  “Mrs. Boweroff, um. There’s something I’d like to talk to you about sometime. Like, a special project. When you’re not busy on the phone or anything.”

  “Busy on the phone? Have my little scouts been spying on their den mother again?”

  But no, that kind of smarting off, no that’s not right here either. That’s Josh talking again. I hand over the returns with a lot of extra contact, shoulder and fingers, and I tell her to call me Dolly, Dolly please. She manages an un-flustered smile. I figure that’s as decent a pickup as I’m going to get before I have to go face my—friends.

  “Val, Lilah.”

  “Delores. We thought we spotted you earlier.”

  The women and I stand facing each other at the slower end of the counter, down by the popcorn and candy. The machine takes vegetable oil instead of butter, it reeks of grease. But of course I know what movie I’m going to suggest already. These two can come flaunt their bow-tie blouses all they want, their tinted contacts and Kappa Delta cool, it isn’t going to rattle me. And Julie peeking round the base of the widescreen won’t make any difference either.

  The owner, Orr, said he hired me for this. You people from back East, he said. It’s like you remember all the movies you ever saw and you got ’em stashed away in categories. But the fact is I recommend by rote. I have exactly two choices that I suggest for people who ask, and I couldn’t tell you a line from either of them. I don’t want to spend any more time on this than I have to. I don’t want to hear another word about parties that I’m not invited to. It’s like I’m a diabetic working in the candy factory, and the worst is when I start to blame it on how happy I felt six months ago. Oh I was just thrillingly happy, six months or a year ago. I could swear that when I slipped in a nursing pad, the tickle would dart through me till at last it curled up again inside the shrinking space under my belly. But while I went humming around, playing snuggle and coo, Josh was flailing away as the new Director of Downtown Development—the king of the three-color resume, flailing away while it all went up in smoke. He was supposed to get people to come out of their holes. And I was as bad as anyone else, I wouldn’t even try walking the streets.

  The upshot is that nowadays I feel as if I’m going on with my life behind some kind of papier-maché husk. I’m always at a tremendous internal distance. I can tell these women what to get while by far the larger part of me’s sitting back and giving them a onceover. Well listen, something came in last month, you two really ought to have a look at it. Must have been a rough week for them too, Lilah’s makeup looks cadaverish. Ten Oscar-winning animated shorts, really they’re slick. Valerie’s eyelids tic at the words “Oscar-winning.” But after that her gaze levels, grows calculating, and I can guess the real selling point: showing shorts will help break the ice. You won’t believe the claymation. You know all it is is play-dough. I can see also the resemblance between Julie and these two. Josh is right when he says that families like Valerie’s and Lilah’s are just off the farm.

  “But with the claymation, it’s like magic.” If I hadn’t tasted Chapstick, I wouldn’t have known I was smiling. “It looks they’re hardly giving it a touch, but then the doll or whatever keeps changing shape and changing shape.”

  When they agree, I send Julie off to get the cassette. Just to get that one cassette, which is bad management, no question. Likewise I don’t interfere when she takes the time to read the women’s choices out loud; on the Fellini she practically squeals. All this while the other girls are schlepping round with double orders and VCRs. Ah, but it pains me to see Julie schlep. Trying so hard to leave the ranch behind, ruining that perfect t-square of neck and shoulders. Julie, another five or six years and you’re going to be so lovely—will you have enough left of yourself to know it?

  So I’m talking to the girl when Lilah and Valerie leave. Power suits, who cares? Just another summer fashion. Julie reminds me that there’s something we should talk about, there’s that project she mentioned earlier, and I avoid the other girls’ stares by studying one of the corner mirrors. Then, sure. I guess it is time for another break.

  Lately I haven’t been coming straight home on weekend nights. I’m not meeting anybody, nothing so earth-shattering. And I’m certainly not all fired up from work. The way I poke around, it’s as if I’d never heard that there’d been complaints. Still I’ll open the windows on the Toyota, and I’ll drive a while.

  This time of year, even in the middle of the best subdivisions, the air’s dusty with field burning. The smell’s the same no matter where it comes from, no matter what the crop was, but I want to see. I park away from any trees. There: over the alfalfa highlands, to the east. A heap of smoke the color of a lost nickel, spreading its shoulders and shadowing the low full moon.

  I jam her back into gear, so rough she lurches and dies.

  Josh has the stereo on. I can hear it while I’m still fishing for keys at the door. In fact these new duplexes have such a styrofoam excuse for walls that I can tell he’s playing talk, not music. Not TV talk either. You only get static like that when you record an interview off the radio. And he wouldn’t be playing back an interview just for himself, he must have brought Jesse and Willie over.

  “Hardest thing to play is the blues.” Do I have to hear this the minute I get in the door?

  “All the rest of it, you can just throw on some technique. But the blues is the blues is the blues.”

  Then, click. “That’s Mr. Oscar Peterson,” Josh announces. His voice is a letdown. Your standard Long Island honk, after the musician’s honeyed gravel.

  I’ve come in so sensitive to sound because Josh hasn’t got a light on in the place. There he is on his knees in front of the stereo, trying to read his own notes on the cassette’s
label by the green glow of the tuner. Frowning, obviously drunk. Obviously everything. I come home wanting a little honest family feeling, and every time what I get is Entertainment Tonight. Jesse and Willie. The one who works for a living, most likely he’s racked out on the sofa. And that brrek-brrek across the room somewhere, that’s got to be Willie in the rocker. A condo “living area” like this, there’s nowhere else those guys could be. It holds the stink too, the beer and cigarettes like some dank indoor pollen. We hadn’t lived here a week before Josh had dubbed it Cliffdweller Estates. Now my eyes are adjusting, he forgot the curtains, and I can make out Willie’s agitation against the waxen blear of the windows. I’m reminded of a grasshopper whirring up in the middle of some smudgy farm acreage.

  “Dollbaby! Hey, at last. You remember that tape I asked you for?”

  “Awh.” Forgetful Me, all five fingertips to forehead.

  “Forgot again, honey?”

  “We just get so busy, honey. It’s a consumer paradise around here, I swear.”

  Josh settles his weight back onto his hands. Deliberate, unruffled: we listen to his slacks flap as he extends and crosses his long legs. Not that it fools me. Oh yes I’m in the mood now, I want it to stay dark in here now, and none of his junior-exec smoothy is going to fool me. But before I can move in Jesse stumbles up out of nowhere. Okay Josh, Jesse says, or brays. You promised. You said if she didn’t’ bring home Wild Bunch we could watch Magnifcen’ Seven. The mood I’m in—yes keep it dark, and don’t anybody get up to kiss me or anything—I have to laugh. This is a guy with a million stories about when he was captain of his Ultimate Frisbee team. Josh however plays to the distraction, laughing differently. He puts out a hand, give me five. I yank off my shoes and start in about Denise.

  But the drunken shadow beside him keeps fumbling through the cassettes; Josh keeps up a steady protective buzz. He prefers Sony. The collection must be twice the size it was when we moved west. I get louder: when did you pick her up, Josh? And what did Denise, our daughter, have for dinner? I’m way past worrying about whatever Jesse or Willie might hear. They’ve never held anything back around us. Josh calls them Martyrs of the Revolution. Jesse’s wife has spent most of last year on an internship in Boston, working towards an MBA; Willie’s was studying dance down in L.A., then wrote at the beginning of the summer to say she intended to stay there. Willie even read us the letter. I laughed at one line, where she referred to the valley as “a hive full of drones.” The guys all got upset with me that time, too.

  “Oregon’s been fantastic for us that way, man.” Except Josh of course, he never gets upset. He just goes on playing to Jesse. “I think the collection’s three times the size it was when we came out here.”

  “Josh, I am not talking about Clint Eastwood. I’m asking about dinner, what did you—“

  “Didn’t cost us a dime, babe.” The light from the tuner pools greenly a moment in the top of his beer can. “We had the free tacos at the Lost Mine, don’t worry about it.”

  At the Downtown Development office, they couldn’t handle these moves. Josh’s favorite was to come on like a party boy at a meeting, then go back to the office and work some angle off the very information the people had given away while they were dazzled by the scotch and one-liners. But I’m circling closer. He has to give me a straight answer, and I don’t miss how angrily he shoots his beer back in among the music tapes, either. Shadow boxing. I’m almost between him and Jesse now.

  “You didn’t pick her up till eight? She had to sleep on Honey’s sofa?”

  “It was better for her there. Really. The TV going, it’s soothing.”

  “Oh Josh, I can’t believe you. No wonder Lilah and Val told everyone you made a pass at them. I mean you are capable of doing some of the stupidest things, Josh, there’s just no end to it. You’re like a goddamn black hole of—“

  But Willie interrupts. Willie this time, and not with his rocking. The chair’s quiet, the outlines in it have shrunk. Still even after turning to look it takes a moment to realize that the sound that stopped me is sobs. First reaction—sag back a step. One of the sofa-arms catches my leg. The pain’s surprising, though I must have known how tightly my muscles were clenched.

  “I can’t stand it,” Willie’s saying. “It’s like no matter where I go, it ends up the same old scene.”

  What shakes me most is seeing how good these guys are for each other. I get a glimpse of Willie’s hands, bent back, shoving his tears into his beard; then the other two are there to help. Josh starts his patter while he’s still stumping across the rug. Oh that’s just ’cause we’re from New York, man, don’t pay any attention. That’s just the way couples talk in New York. Slick stuff, typical, but Willie jams his face into my husband’s chest as soon as he gets close. Which means I also have to notice again how big my husband is. Even kneeling, Josh can fit his arm comfortably around Willie’s shoulders, and with Jesse at the crying man’s feet I’m reminded of one of his old rugby scrums. Bagels Boweroff, the only boy from the Five Towns I’d ever heard of who could really play preppy games. I used to want to snuggle forever in that wraparound bulk. I used to think—God we’re helpless—that his drinking made him exotic.

  Willie’s sounding better. “I know you’re nice people,” gulping and nodding. “That’s what makes it so hard, all these nice people turning into monsters.”

  God we’re helpless. My legs have gone slack, my ears have cooled. “You know you guys,” I say, “I had something interesting come up at the Video World tonight.”

  “Oh Christ,” Josh says. “Did those assholes from Downtown Development come in again?”

  But I’m caught up in Willie’s look, his eyes mica. Josh was too smart for me, bringing these two home to run interference. He’s got me hating myself for my viciousness when I came in. And I’ll probably be asleep again by the time he comes upstairs. This must be what they mean by that word “estranged”, a word I’ve never quite grasped: this shrinking back inside my husk, like an insect dying inside its skeleton, all while sinking into the sofa with an itchy smile and telling these men, for no good reason, about what Julie’s asked me to do.

  “It’s called the Shadow Project. They’ve set it up for the anniversary of Hiroshima.”

  Willie won’t give me a break. He’s as bad as Julie, staring while I babble on about claymation. But I meet his look. “You guys remember the victims near Ground Zero. They left nothing but a shadow, a permanent shadow, like on a wall or a sidewalk.” This coming August 6th, while people were still asleep, the Project would paint the same kind of shadows around town.

  “We want them to be exposed to it.” I’ve dropped my smile. “We want them to feel that flash, for once in their lives.”

  Apparently that does it. Everybody gets enthusiastic, Josh especially. Hey I’ve heard of this thing, Dollbabe, it’s like a big nationwide group thing. Willie gets the rocker going again, Jesse seems to cross in front of me more than once. In any case somehow they find their movie. While Josh keeps up his happytalk—you’ll get to show off your skills, too—the room starts to brighten at last as the FBI warning comes on. Toothy low shadows are cast across the ruts Willie’s made in the shag wall-to-wall.

  “The only problem I see with the whole project,” Josh goes on, “is downtown. I mean like what you were saying earlier, about the consumer paradise, that’s only out towards I-5 you know. That’s only the Miracle Mile.”

  His back’s against the farther sofa-arm, his eyes are on the screen. You notice he’s not coming after me about anything else I said.

  “Really babe. Trying some kind of downtown outreach in a community like this, it’s a fantasy.”

  But when the titles come on, the music, it makes Josh look so the opposite of what I feel for him. He has the color of some Romantic hero. Tubercular, with blue lips.

  Valerie, you know, had a daughter who was kidnapped. A four-year-old just erased from the planet one afternoon, in a mall west of Portland. The woman says she’s
still young; she can start again. And I once saw Lilah get wonderfully excited about some wildflowers she’d spotted on a hike through the Cascades. She squatted right in front of Josh’s desk, sweeping her arms to demonstrate how the Oregon Bleeding Hearts had clustered at the base of the fir. Tragedy and passion—not the exclusive property of a woman who used to do mockups for a couple agencies in mid-Manhattan.

  It’s the stairs that give me such long thoughts. The climb back into the dark, with a finger of wine remaining.

  Denise. Maybe she’ll free me up for a good long cry, my little Denizen, my pouchfull of dreams. Her crib is warm. Her cheek is an absolute pliancy. It makes me think again of tapes and films, their trembling surfaces in motion, and then the touch seems to take over my nerves. I don’t feel so nasty and withered anymore, but what happens next isn’t anything like a nice glowy crying jag either. Instead my hand goes numb. It’s magic; she got me while my shell was down. And though I figure it must be only the soreness from hauling videotapes, nonetheless when my arm begins to dissolve I know for certain that in another minute I’ll be helpless: helpless dust, crunched and helpless before every chance break of time or place or sweet talk or fashion or mood that might happen to blow through. I pull away gasping. The wine glass drops and shatters, splashing my naked toes.