by Richard Ford
I looked up at Warren Miller’s house and tried to guess how long I’d waited and how long I would have to wait, and what my mother was saying about the coat and not wearing it. I didn’t see how it mattered, and what I believed she was saying to him was that she didn’t like being kissed, and especially not like that, in front of me, and that she would not stand for it again. I wondered what Warren Miller did with his boat, which I could see in the driveway nosed up, wondered what body of water he put it in and if I would ever get to go in it, or in his airplane–to Spokane–or if I would ever see him again. And for some reason it seemed to me that I wouldn’t, and for that reason I wished I’d put the silver knife he’d given me back in the drawer with the other two. I had no use for it now and I thought I would throw it away when I had the chance, throw it in the river when we drove back across on the way home. And something about that thought, about Warren Miller and the way he looked the last time I’d seen him, through the window of his house, with my mother in the living room, made me remember him–a large smiling man my father had taught to play golf, someone whose name I hadn’t remembered or hadn’t said anything to, only saw, maybe through a window or inside a car, or at a distance hitting a golf ball. I had only that part of a memory.
I wondered if there was some pattern or an order to things in your life–not one you knew but that worked on you and made events when they happened seem correct, or made you confident about them or willing to accept them even if they seemed like wrong things. Or was everything just happening all the time, in a whirl without anything to stop it or cause it–the way we think of ants, or molecules under the microscope, or the way others would think of us, not knowing our difficulties, watching us from another planet?
From down the hill I heard the eleven o’clock shift whistle. Men at the oil refinery were going home, and I was tired and wanted Warren Miller to be out of our life, since he didn’t seem to have a place in it.
I got out of the car into the cold street and looked at the house. I thought my mother would come out the door at any minute, but there was no movement there. The porch light was off, but the yellow light inside was still lit. I thought I heard music, boogie-woogie music–a piano and some horns–but I couldn’t be sure. It could’ve been from the Italian place. I waited a minute, just watching the house. I didn’t know how much time had gone by since my mother had gone inside. I heard a switch engine in the freight yards down the hill. Several more cars drove past me. Finally I walked across the street and up the steps, then stopped halfway and listened. The music was louder and coming from Warren Miller’s living room. I wanted to shout for my mother to come out, or to come to the window and give me a signal. But I didn’t want to shout out ‘Mother’ or ‘Jeanette’.
I walked up the front steps onto the porch, and instead of going to the door and knocking, I went to the front window, through which I could see inside the living room. I saw the table with our dishes still on it. I saw the door to the kitchen was open and the doors to both bedrooms, and beyond them the bathroom where I had been and where the light shone on the white tiles. And I saw my mother and Warren Miller. They were standing in the middle of the living room, right where they’d been when they were dancing. And I think I almost did not see them. If I’d gone back to the car then I wouldn’t have seen them at all, or would not have remembered it. The coat my mother had been wearing was lying on the floor, and she had her bare arms around Warren Miller’s neck and was kissing him and putting her hands in his hair, standing in the middle of the bright room. Warren Miller had pulled my mother’s green dress up from behind her so that you could see where her stockings were held by white elastic straps, and you could see her white underpants. And even though he had his cigar in his hand, held between his fingers, he was holding my mother outside her underwear, and pulling her toward him so hard that he picked her up off the floor and held her against him while he kissed her and she kissed him.
I stood at the window and watched what they did–which was no more than I have said–until my mother’s feet touched the floor again, and I thought they might stop kissing suddenly and both turn and look at me, where I was perfectly visible through the window glass. I did not even want to stop them, or make them do what they didn’t want to do. I just wanted to keep watching until whatever was supposed to happen did happen. Though when my mother’s feet touched the floor I moved to the side, and when I was away from the window I could not move back into it again. I was afraid they would see me. And I simply turned around and walked back down the steps and across the street to the car, got in the driver’s seat, and waited for my mother to finish what she was doing there and come out so we could go home.
In not very much time the front door of the house opened and my mother walked out, not wearing the coat, just in her green dress. She walked straight down the steps. I didn’t see Warren Miller. The door stayed open only for a moment, and then it closed. The porch light did not come on again, though I saw a light go off inside the house.
My mother hurried across the street and got into the car beside me and shivered when she closed the door. ‘He needs a nicer house,’ she said. She crossed her arms together in front of her and she shivered again and shook her head. I could smell the sweet greasy odor of the red hair tonic that was in Warren Miller’s bathroom. ‘Aren’t you cold?’ she said. ‘It’s getting colder. It’ll snow next, and then what?’
‘It’s not supposed to,’ I said. I hadn’t started the car yet. We were just sitting in the dark.
‘Good,’ she said and blew on the back of her hands. ‘I surprised myself. I had a good time. Did you have one, too?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I did,’ though that was a lie.
‘I didn’t want that old coat, though. I just didn’t.’ She put her hands to her face. ‘My cheeks are hot.’ She turned and looked into the back seat as if she expected to see someone there, then she looked at me in the dark. ‘Did you like him?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not too much.’
‘Are you sorry you came, then? Is that what you’re telling me?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I haven’t thought about that.’ I touched the key and turned it to start the car. The heater fan came on, blowing cold air.
‘Well, think about it,’ she said.
‘I will.’
‘What will you think about me after I’m dead?’ she said. ‘Maybe you haven’t thought about that yet, either.’
‘I’ve thought about that,’ I said, and I switched off the heater.
‘And? What’s my verdict? I can take it if it’s guilty.’
‘I’d miss you,’ I said, ‘I know that.’
‘Warren says he means it about taking you up in his airplane,’ she said. ‘He says you can learn all of Morse code in one afternoon’s lesson. I always wanted to know that. I could send secret messages to people in other places.’
‘Why did his wife leave him,’ I asked. It was all I could think of to say.
‘I don’t know about it,’ my mother said. ‘He isn’t handsome at all. Though of course men have more ways to be handsome. Unlike women. Do you think you’re handsome?’ When she said this she looked straight at me. We were just sitting in the car, in front of Warren Miller’s house, in the dark, talking. ‘You look like your dad. Do you think he’s handsome?’
‘I think he is,’ I said.
‘I think he is, too,’ my mother said. ‘I’ve always thought he was very handsome.’ She put the palm of her hand to the cold window glass beside her, then held it against her cheek. ‘It’s lonely up here, isn’t it? Do you think it’s lonely?’
‘Right now I do,’ I said.
‘It’s not so much a matter of being alone or wanting somebody who’s not there, is it? It’s being with people who aren’t appropriate enough. I think that’s right.’
‘May-be,’ I said.
‘And you’re with me.’ My mother smiled at me. ‘I guess I’m not very appropriate. It’s too bad. Too bad for me, I me
an.’
‘I think you’re appropriate,’ I said. I looked up at Warren Miller’s house and saw that all the lights were turned off in the front room. A single light was burning from the side window. He was in his bedroom, and I could think of him bent over at the closet door, taking off his boots, his hand on the blue wallpaper for balance. Maybe, I thought, he was not to blame for kissing my mother and holding her dress up over her hips. Maybe that’s all he could do. Maybe no one was to blame for that, or for much of what happened to anyone.
‘Why don’t we drive away now?’ my mother said to me. ‘Do you feel all right?’
‘I feel fine,’ I said.
‘I know you drank some wine.’
‘I feel all right,’ I said. ‘How do you feel?’
‘Oh, well,’ my mother said. ‘How do I feel? I’m afraid of becoming somebody else now, I guess. Somebody very new and different. That’s probably how the world works. We just don’t know it until it happens. “Ha-ha,” I guess is what we should say. “Ha-ha.” ’ She smiled at me again.
Then I drove off down the street away from Warren Miller’s house, thinking that the world was becoming different for me, too, and in a hurry. I could feel it, like a buzz all around me, exactly like my father told me the world felt to him when it began to change.
When we walked into the house that night the telephone was ringing. It was eleven-thirty. My mother went straight back into the kitchen and answered it. It was my father calling from the forest fire.
‘Yes, Jerry. How are you?’ I heard my mother say. I could see her standing at the kitchen table. She was winding the phone cord around her finger and looking at me through the door as she talked to him. She looked taller than she had looked in Warren Miller’s house. Her face looked different, more businesslike, less ready to smile. I stood and watched her as if I was going to talk next, although I knew I wasn’t going to.
‘Well, that’s very good, honey,’ my mother said. ‘It is. I’m relieved to know that.’ She nodded, still watching me. I knew she wasn’t thinking about me, maybe wouldn’t even have known I was the person she was looking at. ‘Well, what a thing to see,’ she said. ‘My God.’ She looked around her and found the cup she had been drinking whiskey out of before we’d left earlier that evening, and stood holding it as she talked. ‘Well, is it possible to breathe at all?’ she said. ‘That’s what I’ve wanted to know. That seemed important.’
Then my father talked for a while. I could hear his voice buzzing in the receiver from all the way across the room.
‘Uh-huh,’ she said. ‘Uh-huh.’ She was just holding the empty cup. She even turned it up a last time and let the few drops drain into her mouth while she listened. Then she set it down beside her on the table. ‘Yes. You reach your limits. I know that. You have to adapt,’ she said. ‘How can it happen so fast? My God.’ My father talked again, and my mother looked out at me and pointed with her finger toward the hallway, and she mouthed the words, ‘Go to bed.’
I wasn’t going to get to talk to my father that night, though I wished I could’ve gotten on the line and told him that I missed him, that we both did, and we wished he’d come home tonight. But that was not what my mother wanted, and I did what she said because I didn’t want there to be an argument late at night with my father on the phone, and her drunk and in love with another man.
My mother didn’t talk to my father much longer. From my room I could hear a word she would say, then she would lower her voice and talk. I didn’t hear my name mentioned or Warren Miller’s or the air base job she had applied for that day. I heard the words ‘spontaneous’ and ‘lie’ and ‘private’ and ‘sweet’. That was all. And in a few minutes I heard the receiver put down, and a cabinet door open and the sound of glass touching glass.
I was already in bed when my mother came in my room. The ceiling light was still on, and I thought she would turn if off for me. She had another glass of whiskey with her. I had never seen her drink so much as she had on that day and that night. She had not been a drinker before.
‘Your father says hello to his only son,’ she said, and took a drink. ‘He said he saw a bear catch on fire. Isn’t that something?’ I was just listening to her. ‘He said it had climbed a tree to get away and the fire exploded in the branches all around it. The poor bear jumped out completely on fire and ran away. That’s a thing to remember, isn’t it?’
‘Did he say he was coming home,’ I asked. I was thinking, lying in my bed, that it might be snowing where he was, and that the fire would go out by itself.
‘He may stay on a while longer,’ my mother said. ‘I didn’t ask for the vital details. Are you proud of him? Are you coming to that conclusion?’
‘Yes. I am,’ I said.
‘That’s fine,’ she said. ‘He’d like you to be. I wouldn’t talk you out of it.’
‘Are you proud of him?’ I asked.
‘Oh,’ my mother said. ‘Do you remember when we got very close to the fire when we went up there? And you got out and went over to it–I guess I wanted you to experience it. But when you came back, I told you that the whole fire was just a lot of little separate fires? And once in a while they blew up together and destroyed everything?’ She stuck her finger in her glass, then put her finger in her mouth. ‘Well, I guess I think nothing’s that important by itself,’ she said softly.
‘I believe that,’ I said, though I didn’t believe she had answered my question about my father.
‘It is right,’ my mother said, and was irritated. ‘I know what’s right, for God’s sake. I’ve just never thrown myself into anything like that before.’ She took a deep breath and let it out in a rush. She stared out my window into the night. ‘What would you think if I killed someone–would you be embarrassed?’ She looked at me, and I knew she wasn’t thinking of killing anyone.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I would. I wouldn’t like it.’
‘Well. All right, then,’ my mother said. ‘That’s out. I have to figure out something else. Something more interesting.’
‘Are you proud of Dad,’ I asked. ‘You didn’t answer that.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘No. Not much. You shouldn’t let that bother you, though–you know, sweetheart? It’s not very important who I’m proud of. Myself. I should just want to be proud of myself. That’s all. You have to put your trust into something else now.’ She smiled at me. ‘I was just wondering why I thought I had to take you with me tonight. We do strange things sometimes. I don’t know who I was showing to whom. You probably don’t even care about it. It’s just one thing, not a lot of things.’
‘I thought you wanted me to go with you,’ I said.
‘Well, that’s right. You’re right.’ She smiled at me again and pushed her fingers back through her hair.
‘Did Warren tell you his story about seeing the geese from the airplane?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Isn’t that a wonderful story?’ my mother said. ‘It’s baloney, of course. He just thinks things up and says them.’ She turned the light off. ‘It’s diverting, though,’ she said, and then she said good night and closed the door behind her.
And I lay in bed for just a little time, thinking before I went to sleep that Warren Miller didn’t seem like the kind of man to make a story up. He seemed like the kind of man things happened to, the way my mother had said, and who did the wrong things and tried to act as if he didn’t by acting better, a man my father might’ve said had bad character. I wondered what my father had said about me tonight, if he was mad at me, and if I’d done something wrong and was trying to act as if I hadn’t. As I slipped down into sleep I thought I could hear my mother dialing the telephone. I waited, and could feel myself alive while the ringing went on and someone answered somewhere–Warren Miller, I thought, no one else. I heard his voice, ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes.’ Then it was silent and I went to sleep.
At two o’clock that night I came awake. Down the hall, I heard the toilet running, and I could hear someone jiggling
the handle to make the running stop. I listened to the noise of the metal on the tank and the water running through the pipes, and I got out of bed and went to the door of my room and stepped out into the dark hall where I could not be seen. And I waited there until the bathroom door opened and the light cast onto the floor and Warren Miller came out, turned back and clicked off the bathroom light, and then walked in the direction of my mother’s room. He was naked. In the light I saw his legs and his chest which were covered with hair. I saw his penis, and when he turned I saw the scars on the back of his legs, where the barbed wire had hit him. It looked to me like skin that had been shot with a shotgun. He was wearing his glasses, and as he walked toward my mother’s room I saw how he limped, that one leg, his right one, would not straighten and for that reason made him dip to the side and made his other leg, his good one, throw out farther ahead in a way that made the limp be worse. His white body shone in the dark hallway as he went away from me, and I stood in my tee shirt and underpants as he opened the door to my mother’s room–where there was no light–and heard her soft voice from inside say, ‘Be quiet, now. Just be quiet.’ The door closed, then, and I heard her bed squeeze down under his weight. I heard my mother sigh, and I heard Warren Miller cough and clear his throat. I was cold there, my back to the hall closet door. My legs were cold and my feet and hands were. But I didn’t want to move from there because I wanted to know what else would go on and felt that something would.
In the room I heard my mother’s soft voice and Warren Miller’s. I heard the bed squeeze again and make a thumping noise. I heard my mother say, ‘Oh, now,’ not in an excited way, just in a way to not like something. The bed made more noise, and I knew I’d slept through other noises already, and that when I thought I’d heard my mother calling Warren Miller on the telephone that is what I had heard.
