Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar

by Richard Ford

  “You wait,” Henry Kitteridge said, stepping around the boxes Jerry had brought into the back room. “From their very first fever, you never stop worrying.”

  “I can’t wait,” Denise said, and for the first time it occurred to Henry that soon she would have children and not work for him anymore.

  Unexpectedly Jerry spoke. “Do you like him? Tony? You two get along?”

  “I do like him,” Denise said. “Thank goodness. I was scared enough to meet him. Do you have a best friend from childhood?”

  “I guess,” Jerry said, color rising in his fat, smooth cheeks. “But we kind of went our separate ways.”

  “My best friend,” said Denise, “when we got to junior high school, she got kind of fast. Do you want another soda?”

  A Saturday at home: Lunch was crabmeat sandwiches, grilled with cheese. Christopher was putting one into his mouth, but the telephone rang, and Olive went to answer it. Christopher, without being asked, waited, the sandwich held in his hand. Henry’s mind seemed to take a picture of that moment, his son’s instinctive deference at the very same time they heard Olive’s voice in the next room. “Oh, you poor child,” she said, in a voice Henry would always remember—filled with such dismay that all her outer Olive-ness seemed stripped away. “You poor, poor child.”

  And then Henry rose and went into the other room, and he didn’t remember much, only the tiny voice of Denise, and then speaking for a few moments to her father-in-law.

  The funeral was held in the Church of the Holy Mother of Contrition, three hours away in Henry Thibodeau’s hometown. The church was large and dark with its huge stained-glass windows, the priest up front in a layered white robe, swinging incense back and forth, Denise already seated in the front near her parents and sisters by the time Olive and Henry arrived. The casket was closed, and had been closed at the wake the evening before. The church was almost full. Henry, seated next to Olive toward the back, recognized no one, until a silent large presence made him look up, and there was Jerry McCarthy. Henry and Olive moved over to make room for him.

  Jerry whispered, “I read about it in the paper,” and Henry briefly rested a hand on the boy’s fat knee.

  The service went on and on; there were readings from the Bible, and other readings, and then an elaborate getting ready for Communion. The priest took cloths and unfolded them and draped them over a table, and then people were leaving their seats aisle by aisle to go up and kneel and open their mouths for a wafer, all sipping from the same large silver goblet, while Henry and Olive stayed where they were. In spite of the sense of unreality that had descended over Henry, he was struck with the unhygienic nature of all these people sipping from the same cup, and struck—with cynicism—at how the priest, after everyone else was done, tilted his beaky head back and drank whatever drops were left.

  Six young men carried the casket down the center aisle. Olive nudged Henry with her elbow, and Henry nodded. One of the pallbearers—one of the last ones—had a face that was so white and stunned that Henry was afraid he would drop the casket. This was Tony Kuzio, who, thinking Henry Thibodeau was a deer in the early morning darkness just a few days ago, had pulled the trigger of his rifle and killed his best friend.

  Who was to help her? Her father lived far upstate in Vermont with a wife who was an invalid, her brothers and their wives lived hours away, her in-laws were immobilized by grief. She stayed with her in-laws for two weeks, and when she came back to work, she told Henry she couldn’t stay with them much longer; they were kind, but she could hear her mother-in-law weeping all night, and it gave her the willies; she needed to be alone so she could cry by herself.

  “Of course you do, Denise.”

  “But I can’t go back to the trailer.”

  “No.”

  That night he sat up in bed, his chin resting on both hands. “Olive,” he said, “the girl is utterly helpless. Why, she can’t drive a car, and she’s never written a check.”

  “How can it be,” said Olive, “that you grow up in Vermont and can’t even drive a car?”

  “I don’t know,” Henry acknowledged. “I had no idea she couldn’t drive a car.”

  “Well, I can see why Henry married her. I wasn’t sure at first. But when I got a look at his mother at the funeral—ah, poor thing. But she didn’t seem to have a bit of oomph to her.”

  “Well, she’s about broken with grief.”

  “I understand that,” Olive said patiently. “I’m simply telling you he married his mother. Men do.” After a pause, “Except for you.”

  “She’s going to have to learn to drive,” Henry said. “That’s the first thing. And she needs a place to live.”

  “Sign her up for driving school.”

  Instead, he took her in his car along the back dirt roads. The snow had arrived, but on the roads that led down to the water, the fishermen’s trucks had flattened it. “That’s right. Slowly up on the clutch.” The car bucked like a wild horse, and Henry put his hand against the dashboard.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Denise whispered.

  “No, no. You’re doing fine.”

  “I’m just scared. Gosh.”

  “Because it’s brand-new. But, Denise, nitwits can drive cars.”

  She looked at him, a sudden giggle coming from her, and he laughed himself then, without wanting to, while her giggle grew, spilling out so that tears came to her eyes, and she had to stop the car and take the white handkerchief he offered. She took her glasses off and he looked out the window the other way while she used the handkerchief. Snow had made the woods alongside the road seem like a picture in black and white. Even the evergreens seemed dark, spreading their boughs above the black trunks.

  “Okay,” said Denise. She started the car again, again he was thrown forward. If she burned out the clutch, Olive would be furious.

  “That’s perfectly all right,” he told Denise. “Practice makes perfect, that’s all.”

  In a few weeks, he drove her to Augusta, where she passed the driving test, and then he went with her to buy a car. She had money for this. Henry Thibodeau, it turned out, had had a good life insurance policy, so at least there was that. Now Henry Kitteridge helped her get the car insurance, explained how to make the payments. Earlier, he had taken her to the bank, and for the first time in her life she had a checking account. He had shown her how to write a check.

  He was appalled when she mentioned at work one day the amount of money she had sent the Church of the Holy Mother of Contrition, to ensure that candles were lit for Henry every week, a mass said for him each month. He said, “Well, that’s nice, Denise.” She had lost weight, and when, at the end of the day, he stood in the darkened parking lot, watching from beneath one of the lights on the side of the building, he was struck by the image of her anxious head peering over the steering wheel; and as he got into his own car, a sadness shuddered through him that he could not shake all night.

  “What in hell ails you?” Olive said.

  “Denise,” he answered. “She’s helpless.”

  “People are never as helpless as you think they are,” Olive answered. She added, clamping a cover over a pot on the stove, “God, I was afraid of this.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “Just take the damn dog out,” Olive said. “And sit yourself down to supper.”

  An apartment was found in a small new complex outside of town. Denise’s father-in-law and Henry helped her move her few things in. The place was on the ground floor and didn’t get much light. “Well, it’s clean,” Henry said to Denise, watching her open the refrigerator door, the way she stared at the complete emptiness of its new insides. She only nodded, closing the door. Quietly, she said, “I’ve never lived alone before.”

  In the pharmacy he saw that she walked around in a state of unreality; he found his own life felt unbearable in a way he would never have expected. The force of this made no sense. But it alarmed him; mistakes could be made. He forgot to tell Cliff Mott to eat a banana for potassiu
m, now that they’d added a diuretic with his digitalis. The Tibbets woman had a bad night with erythromycin; had he not told her to take it with food? He worked slowly, counting pills sometimes two or three times before he slipped them into their bottles, checking carefully the prescriptions he typed. At home, he looked at Olive wide-eyed when she spoke, so she would see she had his attention. But she did not have his attention. Olive was a frightening stranger; his son often seemed to be smirking at him. “Take the garbage out!” Henry shouted one night, after opening the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink, seeing a bag full of eggshells and dog hairs and balled-up waxed paper. “It’s the only thing we ask you to do, and you can’t even manage that!”

  “Stop shouting,” Olive told him. “Do you think that makes you a man? How absolutely pathetic.”

  Spring came. Daylight lengthened, melted the remaining snows so the roads were wet. Forsythias bloomed clouds of yellow into the chilly air, then rhododendrons screeched their red heads at the world. He pictured everything through Denise’s eyes, and thought the beauty must be an assault. Passing by the Caldwells’ farm, he saw a handwritten sign, free kittens, and he arrived at the pharmacy the next day with a kitty-litter box, cat food, and a small black kitten, whose feet were white, as though it had walked through a bowl of whipped cream.

  “Oh, Henry,” Denise cried, taking the kitten from him, tucking it to her chest.

  He felt immensely pleased.

  Because it was such a young thing, Slippers spent the days at the pharmacy, where Jerry McCarthy was forced to hold it in his fat hand, against his sweat-stained shirt, saying to Denise, “Oh, yuh. Awful cute. That’s nice,” before Denise freed him of this little furry encumbrance, taking Slippers back, nuzzling her face against his, while Jerry watched, his thick, shiny lips slightly parted. Jerry had taken two more classes at the university, and had once again received A’s in both. Henry and Denise congratulated him with the air of distracted parents, no cake this time.

  She had spells of manic loquaciousness, followed by days of silence. Sometimes she stepped out the back door of the pharmacy, and returned with swollen eyes. “Go home early, if you need to,” he told her. But she looked at him with panic. “No. Oh, gosh, no I want to be right here.”

  It was a warm summer that year. He remembers her standing by the fan near the window, her thin hair flying behind her in little undulating waves, while she gazed through her glasses at the windowsill. Standing there for minutes at a time. She went, for a week, to see one of her brothers. Took another week to see her parents. “This is where I want to be,” she said, when she came back.

  “Where’s she going to find another husband in this tiny town?” Olive asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ve wondered,” Henry admitted.

  “Someone else would go off and join the Foreign Legion, but she’s not the type.”

  “No. She’s not the type.”

  Autumn arrived, and he dreaded it. On the anniversary of Henry Thibodeau’s death, Denise went to mass with her in-laws. He was relieved when that day was over, when a week went by, and another, although the holidays loomed, and he felt trepidation, as though he were carrying something that could not be set down. When the phone rang during supper one night, he went to get it with a sense of foreboding. He heard Denise make small screaming sounds—Slippers had gotten out of the house without her seeing, and planning to drive to the grocery store just now, she had run over the cat.

  “Go,” Olive said. “For God’s sake. Go over and comfort your girlfriend.”

  “Stop it, Olive,” Henry said. “That’s unnecessary. She’s a young widow who ran over her cat. Where in God’s name is your compassion?” He was trembling.

  “She wouldn’t have run over any goddamn cat if you hadn’t given it to her.”

  He brought with him a Valium. That night he sat on her couch, helpless while she wept. The urge to put his arm around her small shoulders was very strong, but he sat holding his hands together in his lap. A small lamp shone from the kitchen table. She blew her nose on his white handkerchief, and said, “Oh, Henry. Henry.” He was not sure which Henry she meant. She looked up at him, her small eyes almost swollen shut; she had taken her glasses off to press the handkerchief to them. “I talk to you in my head all the time,” she said. She put her glasses back on. “Sorry,” she whispered.

  “For what?”

  “For talking to you in my head all the time.”

  “No, no.”

  He put her to bed like a child. Dutifully she went into the bathroom and changed into her pajamas, then lay in the bed with the quilt to her chin. He sat on the edge of the bed, smoothing her hair until the Valium took over. Her eyelids drooped, and she turned her head to the side, murmuring something he couldn’t make out. As he drove home slowly along the narrow roads, the darkness seemed alive and sinister as it pressed against the car windows. He pictured moving far upstate, living in a small house with Denise. He could find work somewhere up north; she could have a child. A little girl who would adore him; girls adored their fathers.

  “Well, widow-comforter, how is she?” Olive spoke in the dark from the bed.

  “Struggling,” he said.

  “Who isn’t.”

  The next morning he and Denise worked in an intimate silence. If she was up at the cash register and he was behind his counter, he could still feel the invisible presence of her against him, as though she had become Slippers, or he had—their inner selves brushing up against the other. At the end of the day, he said, “I will take care of you,” his voice thick with emotion.

  She stood before him, and nodded. He zipped her coat for her.

  To this day he does not know what he was thinking. In fact, much of it he can’t seem to remember. That Tony Kuzio paid her some visits. That she told Tony he must stay married, because if he divorced, he would never be able to marry in the church again. The piercing of jealousy and rage he felt to think of Tony sitting in Denise’s little place late at night, begging her forgiveness. The feeling that he was drowning in cobwebs whose sticky maze was spinning about him. That he wanted Denise to continue to love him. And she did. He saw it in her eyes when she dropped a red mitten and he picked it up and held it open for her. I talk to you in my head all the time. The pain was sharp, exquisite, unbearable.

  “Denise,” he said one evening as they closed up the store. “You need some friends.”

  Her face flushed deeply. She put her coat on with a roughness to her gestures. “I have friends,” she said, breathlessly.

  “Of course you do. But here in town.” He waited by the door until she got her purse from out back. “You might go square dancing at the Grange Hall. Olive and I used to go. It’s a nice group of people.”

  She stepped past him, her face moist, the top of her hair passing by his eyes. “Or maybe you think that’s square,” he said in the parking lot, lamely.

  “I am square,” she said, quietly.

  “Yes,” he said, just as quietly. “I am too.” As he drove home in the dark, he pictured being the one to take Denise to a Grange Hall dance. “Spin your partner, and promenade . . . ,” her face breaking into a smile, her foot tapping, her small hands on her hips. No—it was not bearable, and he was really frightened now by the sudden emergence of anger he had inspired in her. He could do nothing for her. He could not take her in his arms, kiss her damp forehead, sleep beside her while she wore those little-girl flannel pajamas she’d worn the night Slippers died. To leave Olive was as unthinkable as sawing off his leg. In any event, Denise would not want a divorced Protestant; nor would he be able to abide her Catholicism.

  They spoke to each other little as the days went by. He felt coming from her now an unrelenting coldness that was accusatory. What had he led her to expect? And yet when she mentioned a visit from Tony Kuzio, or made an elliptical reference to seeing a movie in Portland, an answering coldness arose in him. He had to grit his teeth not to say, “Too square to go square dancing, then?” How he hated that the
words lovers’ quarrel went through his head.

  And then just as suddenly she’d say—ostensibly to Jerry McCarthy, who listened those days with a new comportment to his bulky self, but really she was speaking to Henry (he could see this in the way she glanced at him, holding her small hands together nervously)—“My mother, when I was very little, and before she got sick, would make special cookies for Christmas. We’d paint them with frosting and sprinkles. Oh, I think it was the most fun I ever had sometimes”—her voice wavering while her eyes blinked behind her glasses. And he would understand then that the death of her husband had caused her to feel the death of her girlhood as well; she was mourning the loss of the only herself she had ever known—gone now, to this new, bewildered young widow. His eyes, catching hers, softened.

  Back and forth this cycle went. For the first time in his life as a pharmacist, he allowed himself a sleeping tablet, slipping one each day into the pocket of his trousers. “All set, Denise?” he’d say when it was time to close. Either she’d silently go get her coat, or she’d say, looking at him with gentleness, “All set, Henry. One more day.”

  Daisy Foster, standing now to sing a hymn, turns her head and smiles at him. He nods back and opens the hymnal. “A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing.” The words, the sound of the few people singing, make him both hopeful and deeply sad. “You can learn to love someone,” he had told Denise, when she’d come to him in the back of the store that spring day. Now, as he places the hymnal back in the holder in front of him, sits once more on the small pew, he thinks of the last time he saw her. They had come north to visit Jerry’s parents, and they stopped by the house with the baby, Paul. What Henry remembers is this: Jerry saying something sarcastic about Denise falling asleep each night on the couch, sometimes staying there the whole night through. Denise turning away, looking out over the bay, her shoulders slumped, her small breasts just slightly pushing out against her thin turtleneck sweater, but she had a belly, as though a basketball had been cut in half and she’d swallowed it. No longer the girl she had been—no girl stayed a girl—but a mother, tired, and her round cheeks had deflated as her belly had expanded, so that already there was a look of the gravity of life weighing her down. It was at that point Jerry said sharply, “Denise, stand up straight. Put your shoulders back.” He looked at Henry, shaking his head. “How many times do I keep telling her that?”