by Dan Chaon
“If he’s cute,” Courtney said, “bring him in here.” She tilted her head a little, looking at something other than Trent, then bent to fill a bucket full of ice. “Maybe I’ll hit it off with him and end up as your daughter-in-law.”
2
Trent had been married before, briefly, when he was eighteen. His wife’s name was Brooke, and she was a girl he dated in high school. She had gotten pregnant, of course, and in the beginning there had been all sorts of tortuous debates—abortion or no abortion, adoption or no adoption, staying together or not staying together. It had been harder on Brooke than on him, he thought. She had been the bright one, the one with the academic scholarships, the one who actually had a future to lose, and he felt bad for her.
She was four months pregnant when they finally got married in a little courthouse ceremony. He wore a white shirt and black jeans and a tie he’d borrowed from a friend of his from the track and field team; she wore a modest, oversize blue dress, which came down past her knees. It was the only time in their whole married life that he saw her more or less dressed up—after that, up until the baby was born, she wore sweatsuits, day and night. Her face grew puffy and tired, and she began to suffer from acne, which she’d never had to worry about before. He remembered the look on her face when the judge had told them they could kiss—a kind of slack, distant stare. Then she recovered herself, and gave him a big smile. They pressed their lips together.
He loved her, he thought. They had been dating since the beginning of junior year, and had done everything together—studying and going to movies and eating their lunches across from one another in the cafeteria—and though nothing spectacular had happened, no skinny-dipping or running hand in hand through the rain or licking food off one another, he thought that they fit together. She had been the first girl he’d had sex with, and, in his mind, everything about her was entwined with the stunning pleasures of the body: her lips, the pink palms of her hands, the hollow of her throat, the line of her pubic hair. He didn’t think he’d ever be drawn to other women, since each part seemed endlessly interesting. A few times, they had watched pornography together, but it hadn’t aroused him. It wasn’t something general that he wanted—a breast, a buttock, a daintily pointed toe—but something specific. Her, he thought—Brooke. Her skin, her face, her smell.
There was more to it than that, he knew. You had to live a life beyond fucking, but at the time it didn’t seem all that important. He had never been particularly ambitious, even before Brooke got pregnant, so it wasn’t that hard to adjust his expectations. In his mind he began to build a sort of life—looking at houses, buying baby stuff, finding some sort of trade, like carpentry or plumbing, and it didn’t seem so bad, though he knew that Brooke was scared and depressed by such prospects. Probably, both of them would have ended up unhappy eventually, restless and dissatisfied like the statistics said. There were plenty of bad examples wandering around town—guys who got their high school girlfriends knocked up and ended up in this dusty speck of a Nebraska town. All you had to do was look at them to see how trapped they were.
In any case, it didn’t turn out that way. As it happened, the baby died. She was born with a severely malformed heart and only lasted a little over a day. Sitting in the hospital, he’d known that the future he imagined was over with. Brooke hardly looked at him. The doctors had drugged her into a kind of calm, and they’d gone together to see the baby.
It was a little girl. They had named her Carol Lynn, for the purposes of the funeral and the headstone, but really she didn’t look human. She was a mammal of some unknown species, attached to a myriad of machines, her mouth full of a plastic tube, surrounded by frowning, bustling nurses. How incredibly tiny she was, his daughter—her skin red and blotchy beneath the lights, a downy, peachlike fuzz on her skin. He found himself staring at the perfectly formed little ear, which was shaped, he thought, a bit like his. He wanted to touch it, but he was afraid he wouldn’t be allowed, was afraid that such a request would seem trivial, childish. Beside him, Brooke swayed a little, making a thick, low-voiced sound. Her female chemistry was in a state of anarchy, preparing for a life that wasn’t going to happen; her breasts leaked milk onto her hospital gown, and her nerve network was full of instincts—he thought—instincts carrying mother-messages through her body, despite the sedation. She breathed from her mouth in long, deliberate inhalations, as if she were tasting air for the last time, and when he touched her, put his arm around her, she flinched, and her muscles tightened. For a moment, he thought she might slap him, but she didn’t. She was contracting, he thought, as if she might fold herself up into an infinitely small point, and when she looked at him, it was as if he were shrinking, too—she just wanted him to go away, that was all; she never wanted to see him again. She had loved him, or thought she loved him, up to that moment. Then she didn’t.
That was the end of their marriage, more or less. After the little funeral, Brooke moved back home, to her old room. Arrangements were made—there were a few phone calls, and meetings with lawyers, and papers to be signed—but all in all he was surprised at how quickly and efficiently a divorce could be managed. They’d been married a little over six months, and by the end it hardly seemed real. It was more like the ghost of a marriage—a future that had never happened, in which their daughter grew up and they grew old: Trent, an aging plumber with a gut and a way of looking off into the distance; Brooke, throwing herself into the usual frustrated things—community theater or a local writers group or starting her own business; Carol Lynn emerging into a sweet, hopeful, vaguely ambitious teenager, such as they themselves had been. It would have never been anything spectacular, but it didn’t seem, to Trent, to be a bad life. At the funeral, he had the notion that everyone probably thought it was for the best. There was not much crying, and looking out at the bowed heads, the congregants with their hands clasped solemnly in front of them, he felt certain that they all thought that things were returning to their normal state. Now Brooke could go to college as she’d planned before she got pregnant, and Trent could do whatever it was that he thought he was doing. That was it. “The Lord is my shepherd,” everyone mumbled, “I shall not want.” It was hard not to imagine a guilty sense of relief rippling across their faces, and he turned his head away, looking at the waves of July heat flickering like holograms over the alfalfa fields beyond the cemetery.
Afterward, he didn’t talk to people about it. He moved away from town, traveled around for a while, and finally ended up back in Nebraska, where he thought he might try college to see if it suited him. By that time, he had been silent for so long that it almost seemed like something he was protecting—something unsavory, private, which he would sometimes stir around in his mind when he was deep into a conversation, nudging at it like a sore tooth. There. There. Almost glad of the way this unspoken history kept him separate from people.
He knew that if he asked Dorrie to marry him, he would have to tell her. He would have to tell her before he asked her to marry him, he thought, everything would have to come out in the open. He thought of this when she had told him the story of her marriage to Robert Bender, when she’d talked about David. She was not a very forthcoming person—which was one of the things he liked about her—and he realized that when she gave him this bit of her history, offered it up to him, it was his duty to reciprocate.
But he didn’t. It seemed too complicated, he thought, and his pathways through his own memory seemed as complex and delicate as the holes earthworms and other small insects dug through the soil of a garden. When you put a shovel to the skin of the ground and turned over the dirt, all those tunnels fell apart. The worms and bugs crashed into the sunlight, dazed and wriggling, and the winding ways of their secret cities were lost forever.
It was a corny metaphor, he knew, but it came to him nevertheless as he made a garden for her out behind her house. He turned over the earth, spading up a weedy patch behind her house and mixing it with manure, planting tomatoes and basil and sunfl
owers and squash and hollyhocks, while she sat on the back porch in shorts and sunglasses, reading and occasionally looking up to watch him. She loved him at such times, he thought, when he was simple with physical work, she loved him more than she did when he talked and offered opinions.
“I don’t feel a bit sorry for Virginia Woolf,” he had told her, once. “I mean, don’t you think that most men are just like ‘Shakespeare’s Sister,’ too? You know? Do you think guys out here get the privilege of education more than girls do? Not really. Look at Woolf—she was rich, wasn’t she? And a huge snob, too. I’d rather be her than some butler on her estate. Do you think her male servants had any better chance than she did?”
Dorrie hadn’t been very patient with this argument—“provincial,” she’d called it—and had pointed out various working-class men who had overcome their situations, while there were almost no examples of working-class women who had gone on to achieve literary fame. “I don’t think you have a broad enough view to make a legitimate case,” she had said. She had given him some books to read—but she hadn’t looked at him in the way she did when he was planting the garden, when she had run her smooth hands over the blisters on his palms, when she had softly put her tongue to his fingers, her nose drawing in breath as it passed across his skin. They’d taken off their clothes in the patch of lawn just beyond the garden he’d dug, and she’d pressed her breasts against his chest as he lay beneath her, her lips on his, her hand finding the zipper of his pants, his thoughts falling apart like a shovelful of dirt.
Later, when the tomatoes and squash were beginning to flower, they were side by side in bed, and she asked him about his mother.
“You don’t ever talk to her?” Dorrie said.
“Not really,” he said. “I sent her a card on Mother’s Day.”
“But why?” Dorrie said. She reclined back in the darkness, her soft thigh moving away from his, the musky, powdery smell of her still in his nostrils. “Do you have a problem with your mother?” She was silent for a moment, then said, as if joking: “Is that what this is all about?”
“No,” he said, and shifted awkwardly in the bed, passing his hand over his quieting penis, pushing it down. He thought then to tell Dorrie about his first marriage, about the baby. He couldn’t tell her about his mother’s blankness—about the way he’d come into the house, drunk, on the night of the funeral, to find his mother sitting on the couch, watching television and smoking pot. She was watching an old horror movie in which Charlton Heston ran through the future, screaming. “Soylent Green is people!” he cried, and Trent’s mother looked up, glazed, when Trent walked in. She stared at him for a long time. They had nothing to say to one another.
“What are you watching?” Trent said, quietly, and his mother shrugged.
“Nothing interesting,” she said, and they both grew awkwardly silent. He pressed his palm against the wall to steady himself. He thought that she might be comforting to him, but even now, she wasn’t. She didn’t think that he felt anything, or at least that’s how she acted. He thought of things that she’d said about him—that he liked to manipulate people, that he was sneaky, cold-blooded. “As long as you get what you want, you’re happy,” she’d said to him once. “No matter about anyone else.” She didn’t say that after the baby died, but he felt that she thought it, and he put his hand over his mouth.
“Mom,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
But she didn’t look at him. She kept her eyes on the television, even though it was now just a commercial for used cars.
“What do you have to be sorry about?” she said. “Nobody’s blaming you for anything.” And then she was quiet, closing her eyes, clasping her bare feet in her hands. She watched as he tottered along the edge of the living room, sipping from a bottle of schnapps. “Go to bed,” she said. There was a poster of a wolf behind the couch she was sitting on, a wolf with its muzzle upraised howling at a big blue rising moon, and Trent stared at the poster stupidly as his mother’s eyes examined him. She lifted a bong from the coffee table and drew smoke from it.
She didn’t want him there anymore, he thought, hadn’t wanted him around for a long time—they had been living for a long time like roommates or cousins, sharing the same space but not really thinking much of it, beyond day-to-day bickering or watching television together. They were mother and son, but they didn’t love each other, really—not nearly as much as he’d loved Brooke, or his baby, or later Dorrie herself, who slept, breathing thickly into the dark. The steady, solid shadow of her body was nearby and warm when he pressed his hand against it.
“I’ll have to meet her someday, your mother,” Dorrie had said, after his vague answers had bored her into sleepiness. “You don’t have anything to hide, do you?” Dorrie murmured.
“Yes,” Trent whispered. But Dorrie didn’t answer. She lolled against him, and if his answer registered at all, she didn’t want to know the rest.
“I was married before, you know,” Trent said softly.
“Oh, please,” Dorrie mumbled. “When was that? When you were ten?”
And he was silent. He waited for her to ask again, but she was already asleep.
3
He thought of all this again as Dorrie came out onto the back porch, into the crisp September evening, to find him passing a marijuana cigarette to David Bender. The garden he had planted was going to seed, dying: A few old cherry tomatoes hung on the vine, and the hollyhock flowers had closed into hard seed-pods, and the weeds near the fence had begun to grow stiff and yellow.
“Oh,” she said, her face tightening as David Bender tried to hide the joint in his cupped hands. She gazed at them both for a moment, and Trent wished he had told her. He wished that she knew that he’d gotten the marijuana, was getting her son stoned, for her sake.
“Hey,” she said, and smiled as if she were just another girl at a party. “Hey,” she said. “Are you guys getting high?”
David Bender was the first to break the tableau. He giggled a little, nervously, then brought out the marijuana cigarette that Trent had given him. The cherry of the joint had gone out, and he dipped his head as he offered it to Dorrie.
“You want some?” he said, and they paused nervously as she took it from him, flicking the lighter David Bender offered. They watched as she drew deeply, holding her breath for a long time before exhaling. David and Trent exchanged glances, feeling embarrassed for their various reasons, and Dorrie coughed delicately, putting a fist to her throat.
“Dorrie,” Trent said, and she raised her hand to silence him.
“What?” she said, and looked at David Bender, who shrugged his shoulders, still grinning uncertainly. “You’re really easily shocked,” she said, turning to Trent. “Marijuana has been popular for several generations now, you know.”
“I know,” Trent said. Her eyes held him, but he didn’t know what she was thinking—whether she was hurt or amused or angry or merely challenging, and he wished there were some word he could say, some button he could push, that would make her expression solidify into something he could understand. “I didn’t mean to exclude you or anything,” he said, and tried to smile at her. “I was just—getting to know David, you know? And I thought …”
“No problem,” she said, and took another drag from the joint. “There’s no problem,” she said, and Trent was so flustered that he got down on his hands and knees and kissed her toes, which were sticking out of a pair of sandals. Then he stood up again, embarrassed; he didn’t smoke pot very often, because it made him prone to do ridiculous things—jokes, he guessed, by which he meant to disarm people. It seemed to work with Dorrie, who stared at him for a long moment with a look somewhere between laughter and bewilderment.
“Wow,” David Bender said, with stoned dispassion. “No one ever kisses my feet!”
The bar that Courtney had suggested, The Green Lantern, was on the outskirts of town, and when they walked in, patrons turned to look at them, but they didn’t draw any real attention to themselve
s. Most of the clientele were what Trent and other bartenders called townies, locals not associated with the college, and Dorrie hesitated for a beat, taking it all in. “I wondered where the Old West was hiding itself,” she said wryly, and Trent felt, for the first time that day, somewhat pleased with himselF.Dorrie seemed mellowed, and David Bender seemed to be having a good time, drifting with a kind of hazy merriment toward a booth. He was glad that he’d taken Courtney’s advice and purchased a small bag of marijuana from her. He felt as if he had gotten a grip on what could have been a bad situation.
“This is wonderful,” David Bender said, and surreptitiously eyed a man with a cowboy hat and a handlebar mustache, and an older countrified couple who were dancing, the stuffed heads of elk and antelope and antlered deer that hung on the walls. Various cattle brands had been burned into the pine wood of the wall by their booth, different simple symbols and combined letters, like rows of hieroglyphs, and Dorrie studied them thoughtfully—as if, Trent imagined, she could see something there that no one else could. He felt a teeming of irrational love wash over him—a series of goofy similes for Dorrie, who was as dreamy and mysterious as an anemone in the eddies of cigarette smoke, who was like a picture of the mythological goddess Diana, which he’d seen on the cover of one of Dorrie’s books, Diana turning a hunter into a stag, or like—but he was already embarrassed by his own brain.
“Do you want to dance?” Trent said at last, because a slow song was playing, and Dorrie looked up from whatever she had been thinking, seeming to register this idea from far away.
