The Time of Her Life

by Robb Forman Dew

  Only when Avery became suddenly imperative like this did Claudia become the first little bit uneasy, and she was also cross at Jane, who had finally come downstairs to get lunch after the kitchen had already been cleaned up. She came into the living room, and she was restless and agitated, moving around the room from chair to chair, interrupting her father.

  “Are you going to drive me to Diana’s, Dad? Will you fix me a cheese sandwich first? The chili’s almost gone. It really is awfully spicy, too. Would you make me a sandwich? The kind you do in a skillet?”

  Avery’s attention wandered over to her. He studied her serious face, and he planned carefully in his mind the cheese sandwich he would fix for his daughter: rye bread with two slices of cheese and a piece of ham between. He was quiet while he considered this sandwich. He would sauté it slowly on both sides until it was golden brown. A prize.

  “Jane, for God’s sake,” Claudia said. “I can fix you a cheese sandwich. And there’s plenty of chili left, anyway.” She had closed her book and had been enjoying Avery—his good humor. She liked watching him this afternoon.

  Claudia didn’t think ahead; her day unfolded however it might and almost always in unexpected ways. And in fact, she was unaware now that she had disturbed the image Avery was constructing, because she had snatched away from him the delectable offering he was mentally preparing for his own daughter, and a rather hazy irritation began brewing in his head.

  He looked at his wife, who had moved over to the window and wasn’t even remembering that she had spoken. She was never turned out exactly right, but her lack of style was a style unto itself. Her failure to have ever made a concentrated decision about the way she would dress produced an effect that appeared to be studiously haphazard. Today she was wearing boots that Avery thought must be intended for the outside since they turned down around the calf in a sheepskin cuff. She also wore a long purple skirt and a wheat-colored sweater belted at the waist. The whole outfit was somehow a little off, and besides, it was a style for which she was too full-blown, too buxom. Avery watched her profile against the light, the delineation of her waist and full hips. He begrudged her every single thing, just then, in an almost sibling petulance. He resented the fact that in the elegant room he had designed she was amazingly sexual, untidy, blatantly female.

  “You could never do it,” he said. “You could never possibly make that sandwich the way I can. Your own daughter knows it. It’s not an easy, simple sort of sandwich. That’s what Jane knows. It takes concentration!” He was quite angry. “The cheese oozes out of a sandwich like that if you’re not careful. You would just burn it. It takes timing. How do you think you could ever do that? You won’t even bother to buy the right kind of food. Not once—not once—have you ever come back from the store with anything but processed American cheese and that slick-tasting ham in little square packages that says ‘water added.’ Can’t you ever stop at the deli? Even Janie knows not to ask you to make her a sandwich, don’t you, Janie?” He considered it all for a moment, a trifle calmer. “It’s a sensual sandwich,” he said, and he liked that phrase.

  “I don’t really need a sandwich,” Jane said. “I’m really not all that hungry.”

  Claudia turned as she did at some point in each day to look at Avery in surprise. Jane saw it as an eternal motion, a profound movement her mother would make time and again. Jane hoped desperately that her mother would not try to explain that she could, indeed, make a toasted ham and cheese sandwich. But all Claudia did was look back out the window, and then she came to sudden attention.

  “Oh, God!” she said. “Look! The exterminator’s here. What’s he doing here on Saturday? I haven’t even made the bed. Did you make your bed, Jane? Avery, don’t you want to get dressed? He’s going to be spraying in here first. Don’t you want to change your clothes, Avery?”

  Avery was quite comfortable just the way he was, and he stayed right there on the couch. It was Jane who left the room when her mother opened the door for the Orkin man. She went to the kitchen and made herself a cheese sandwich.

  The exterminator was a burly, bearded man who was wearing rubber surgical gloves and holding the nozzle end of a long piece of tubing that wound its way over his shoulder where it was attached to a cylinder he wore strapped to his back. He was very careful to stamp any debris from his shoes before he stepped into their living room. Avery liked him right away, and he was entertained for a little while, listening to Claudia speak with him and watching the precision with which the man fitted the nozzle against the baseboard heaters in order to spray behind them from his canister of insecticide. As the Orkin man moved slowly along the edges of the room, releasing the poison, its sweet, pungent odor filled the air. It was the scent of bubble gum.

  “Ah,” said Avery, “it’s bubble gum. Dubble Bubble. Why would they scent insecticide like bubble gum?”

  But the Orkin man seemed not to know that Avery was speaking to him. He continued to move deliberately along the wall. Avery was slighted, and he spoke a little louder this time. “Do you know,” he said, “that roaches are as clean as their environment?” There was no slur to any word, only the sly, wide vowels that could rivet Jane’s attention from two rooms’ distance. In fact, she came into the room now with her sandwich on a plate.

  “Janie, your father hates it when you bring food in here,” Claudia said, but Jane stayed where she was, taking note of the descending scale of her mother’s tone that might soon drop right off into anger. The Orkin man only turned to Avery and nodded. He was intent on what he was doing.

  “I read that in World magazine, Dad,” Jane said. “They’ve taken roaches from the slums…” She tried to hold her father’s attention, but he wasn’t looking in her direction; he was interested in getting his point across to this bearded man who was paying so little notice to what he was saying.

  “No, now that’s the truth,” Avery went on, running right over Jane’s words, although he spoke with great cordiality.

  “Is that right?” the exterminator finally replied, but he didn’t turn around. He was moving the nozzle along the edges of the bookcase beside the fireplace.

  “Absolutely. That’s absolutely right.” Avery closed his eyes for a moment, but then he looked again at the industrious man moving around his living room.

  “Now this house. We’re very clean. Not obsessive. Not obsessively clean. Not tidy. I’m neat as a pin myself. My wife believes more in sanitation. Basic cleanliness. She lines the shelves in the door of the refrigerator with aluminum foil.” Avery paused once more, this time long enough so that the exterminator shot him a polite glance.

  “Uh-huh,” he said.

  “Even in the refrigerator we are clean. We are clean right down to the bone around here. The roaches in this house are paragons of insect sanitation. A credit to their species.”

  “Well,” the exterminator said, “this stuff kills all your silverfish, too. And beetles.” He settled back on his haunches as he came to the bottom of the bookcase and looked over at Avery. “It kills spiders. Your small bugs. Those little centipedes. The ones people call doodlebugs.”

  “Spiders,” Avery said. “Good. That’s fine. That’s okay. But what about the flies? Who will kill the flies?” He closed his eyes in a long pause. “We have a lot of flies here in the summer.”

  The Orkin man was readjusting his canister so that he could lower himself enough to reach up into the fireplace. He didn’t say anything as he adjusted the harness that held the cylinder in place. “I don’t know much about flies,” he said with some effort as he peered up into the vast fieldstone chimney. He drew his head back out of the fireplace. “I just started this job. I got laid off at the printworks. They just don’t have the business they used to.”

  “That’s too bad,” Claudia said. “I’m so sorry.” It was all there was to say, but it made her daughter flinch. Avery lay back on the couch again while the exterminator reinserted his torso as far as it would reach into their chimney.

  No o
ne in the room said anything more. But then the Orkin man called out from inside the chimney. “Hey,” he said, “do you know what’s in here?” They watched him as he put down his canister and slowly backed into the room with Avery’s hunting rifle. He brought it down into the room with a puzzled expression and held it out mutely to show the three of them. He had found it on the inside ledge of the fireplace where Claudia had hidden it some long time past. The winter before, she had taken the gun from Avery’s closet and slipped it in among his golf clubs, but when spring had come and the golf course reopened, she had remembered to move it. She had forgotten all about it after that, however, and Avery had never missed it, or never said so.

  All three members of the Parks family stared back silently at the exterminator. All of them were at an absolute loss until Avery gestured broadly in Jane’s direction. “You have to keep those things away from children, you know,” he instructed the man earnestly, but the man gazed back at him a moment without comprehension, and he turned to Jane with curiosity. She was a tall girl for an eleven-year-old, not really a child anymore.

  Avery noticed that glance and gave the Orkin man a secretive, melancholy look, twisting his mouth to one side and cocking his head. He gestured again toward Jane, a small indication, just a sad turning of his hand. “Not quite right, you know,” he said in a parody of a whisper. “Doesn’t have both oars in the water, if you know what I mean.” By now Avery was almost leering with intrigue, and he turned sideways to Jane and gave her a slow wink.

  The Orkin man looked on at Avery for a moment, and he still held the gun flat out in front of him in his two hands. Finally, with a good deal of trouble, he maneuvered himself back into the fireplace and replaced the rifle where he had found it, then left the room to spray the kitchen.

  Jane studied her half-eaten sandwich. When she did look up, she saw her parents each catch the other’s eye and quickly look away. Both their faces were strained with an effort toward nonchalance. Jane’s parents looked off blandly into separate distances in a tremendous effort to cover that shock of recognition. They had been terribly jolted precisely when their eyes met for that one second in their insect-free living room. They didn’t glance at Jane. They didn’t say a word to her or to each other, and the three of them stayed still and silent while the man sprayed insecticide around the kitchen cabinets and underneath the stove.

  Claudia and Avery were entirely overcome with the fact that two people such as they had been forced to such lengths. They were each separately astonished at their own vulnerability and their escape from humiliation, and they didn’t think to say anything to Jane when she left the room with her own face closed down in rage—her mouth tucked in at the corners and the skin over her forehead and cheekbones pale and taut with fury and terrible embarrassment. And there they sat, in odd solemnity, when she came down to tell them that she had packed her overnight things and was walking over to Diana’s. She had decided to spend the night out after all.

  2

  In the night a severe cold front from Canada slipped under the warmer air lying over the central United States, and the dense chill penetrated any small crack or fissure in the buildings in Lunsbury in the same way a heavy fog cannot be kept entirely out of doors. The thermostats all over town had clicked on, and the houses were heated well enough, but Claudia and Avery awoke simultaneously in their darkened bedroom. They lay side by side like gingerbread cookies, their arms and legs lying flat on the bed, their faces staring straight up at the ceiling. It was unusual, because Avery generally slept late and roused himself only with great difficulty. There was an eerie quiet within the room that had alerted them both, and they woke up into instant attention.

  They lay there like that for a while, each knowing that the other was awake. Claudia was selective enough in her attention to the details of her life that when Avery finally spoke out loud, she didn’t take note of the words he was saying; she heard only the unfamiliar tautness of his sober voice.

  “We aren’t going to be able to do it, are we? There’s no way to work this out. It’s just not going to work.” They both lay quite still, and neither of them spoke for a moment. Nellie had heard their voices, and she came shambling into the room and put her head across Claudia’s arm while her feathery tail swept across the floor in a soft whoosh.

  “If I can’t get hold of myself pretty soon, I think we’ll all sink.” He raised his arm up and let it slowly fall back to the mattress in illustration. “Right on down,” he said. “Right down to the bottom.”

  For a few easy moments what Avery was saying was just a noise alive in the room, radiating out into the thick air to break the peculiarly claustrophobic silence. Slowly, though, the energy Claudia thrived on early in the day slipped away from her. She was so careful in the morning to have nothing in her mind but hopefulness, and as Avery’s words came together in their intention, she silently squared off against them: I do work hard at the days. I work hard to make the days go by.

  She really did believe it, too. She was quite certain that in her life there was a connection between the passing of time and her need for it to pass. During any of the days when the pall of Avery’s rage or drunkenness hung over the hours, she had the stray notion in the back of her mind that all the dreary time would pass them by. She had the idea that they were going through something and would one day get to something else. If she had not thought she could force the pace of the days along, sorrow would have caught her up for sure.

  “I’ve got to get myself in shape, Claudia.” He crooked his arm over his face to cover it; he was so sorrowful, but Claudia didn’t trust his sorrow to be in any way beneficial to herself. Besides, she never credited Avery with all the regrets he claimed. She had known him too well for too long. And to possess so many regrets, she suspected, was an evasive kind of self-indulgence. Claudia didn’t pity him at all; he was talking about going away from her.

  She tried to see his expression, but only the sharp planes and angles of his turned head shone palely in the dark room, giving him a frail and skeletal look. He was self-deprecating even in the way he drew himself aside, as though she might find his presence offensive. He lay deliberately apart from her, so careful to enforce dignity upon this situation. It was all Claudia could do not to roll over on top of him, spreading herself across him like a blanket over a horse, her thighs embracing his hips.

  When he was six years old and she was four, at least once he had bent his head down between her legs and nuzzled her—a gentle touch of his lips brushing down the vulnerable ridge of her prepubescent genitals, a sweet familiarization. Surely more than once during the many hours in closets, locked bathrooms, someone’s garage when they had each explored the other and Claudia had splayed herself out open-legged and urgent with the need to have Avery see her and touch her. Avery had been the boy next door, but there had always been more between them than the ordinary curiosity of childhood. They had experienced a thorough lust for the other one as soon as they had grown old enough to realize that they were two separate people sitting in the communal sandbox in their adjoining backyards. There was no telling about this sort of thing. It had been an impulse that overtook them so completely and so young that Claudia was sure it wouldn’t have mattered if they had been male and female or the same sex; that impulse to know the other would have been as strong in either case.

  If she threw herself over him now, with her gown hiked up around her waist, he would have to reach his hands around her and stroke her thighs. His cautious separation from her in their own bed made her angry. She lay quite still while Avery talked. She knew what he was saying. She knew all about him. In fact, as far as personal knowledge went—her subjective perception of a thing—he might be the sum total of hers. She had expanded all her senses in comprehension of Avery.

  When they were growing up in Mississippi, in the summer afternoons, there hadn’t been any turbulent weather. The heat and heavy scent of flowers were a condition of life. In Mississippi in the summer afternoons, ther
e always used to be girls sitting on porches waiting in the dusk. At Claudia’s house they sat and watched the boys in Avery’s driveway playing basketball until the game was given up, and some of those boys drifted over and sat down, sweaty, beside a girl and perhaps touched her arm so that at her age, in high school, and in the soft-edged muted surroundings, a sensation as riveting as an electric current would pass through her, galvanizing her to the moment. The girls Claudia had known, and she herself, had been more persistent in their young lust than the boys. It was ever with them, the idea of it, in classrooms, when they were in gym playing volleyball, away at summer camp. Those girls wouldn’t have chosen to put aside that overwhelming absorption for a quick game of pickup basketball.

  Claudia and her friends had become ill with desire about age twelve. They were, most of them, obsessed with the need to be kissed and caressed and touched and fondled, and by necessity they spent a great deal of their time consumed with interest in all the games and contests of the compellingly awkward teenaged boys. But not one of those girls cared much one way or another about the contests; they simply longed for proximity to those male bodies hot and damp from football practice or a baseball game. And those girls grew disheartened when they became sadly aware of the peculiar nature of the lust of those same boys. That intoxicating, lovely, and longed-for male interest turned out to be not much more than a flashlight beam falling over them in a darkened room. A narrow illumination might linger on them for a while but was then diverted to another object with the very same concentration—basketball, tennis, golf, poker. It was then that the girls began channeling their own passion in other directions, but the nature of society in that town would have been quite different if the girls had not had to adapt so absolutely to the customs of men. It was the beginning of their anger, because this was the difference: Those Mississippi boys were genuinely interested in other abstractions and brutalities of everyday life, while for the girls their social diversions and intellectual devotions were first born of frustration and, in the beginning of their adolescence, were a second-best concern.